photos icloud+ sync not happening

I have a large icloud+ and photo syncing turned on.

I just made a large photo library on OSX into my system lib, sync to iCloud is set, and I have 77k pix on osX and 10k (from before) on my cloud online. I can see my shared albums on osX but the pics aren't downloading to my computer.

I expect all new pixs to be uploaded to the cloud, and those already there are downloaded to my mac. I have not got the "optimize storage" set so expect to get the full res originals. No IP traffic at all happening. What am I missing?