Keep photos on iCloud

marykranberry wrote:

my pc isn’t loading all my old photos bc they’re saved on iCloud. This makes no sense to me. I want to save my photos on my phone and erase them from my phone.

You can sync photos to your PC: Set up and use iCloud Photos on your Windows PC - Apple Support

re: "I want to save my photos on my phone and erase them from my phone. "

Your original question "I want to have my photos saved on iCloud even after I delete them from my phone. How do I do that? " was quite clear about you wanted to do and the answer is equally clear. I'm not at all clear about what you are asking in either sentence of your reply so won't attempt more of an answer.

That is not an option. iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264

Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.

You cannot delete them from the phone and expect to have them in iCloud as well because that's not how iCloud was designed or works.