Need help - iCloud moron. Sorry, kinda long.

laowaigringa

Okay ladies, please help the technologically impaired. I feel like I spend hours and hours backing up all my photos and videos from my phone, loading them onto my laptop and then from there I load the photos to Flickr and the videos to Vimeo. I also load them from my laptop onto a hard drive periodically. But all this is time consuming, especially uploading the videos as they take a long time to upload, then I have to go in and give each one a title, date it, save it again, etc. I've also found it hard to keep track of which videos I've already uploaded so I spend more time scrolling through the ones on my phone to make sure they're on my laptop and Vimeo both before I delete them. I try to keep up with deleting them to free up space for new ones but this is causing frustration as well. There are times when I am absolutely sure I've deleted a photo or video, but then it appears on my phone again! (pretty sure this has something to do with iCloud?) It's frustrating because then I have to start the whole process of checking that I've backed it up all over again. Meanwhile my phone keeps yelling at me about not being able to take more photos or video because the memory is full. I'm too scared to delete anything off my phone unless I've checked that it's backed up first. 

So, I feel like I am probably creating more work for myself because I don't really understand how iCloud works. I realize it's supposed to automatically save everything from my phone and laptop without me having to do anything (I have an iphone and a MacBook) but I just never feel "sure" that the photos will be there. And where is "there" anyway? Is there someplace I can "go" to see what's in my iCloud and check to make sure it's backing everything up? How do I stop stuff from reappearing and taking up space after I've deleted it from my phone? I really need a better system here. Help!