Can you sync your phone icloud photos one way?

I've just spent a heap of time loading all my photos (I'm talking YEARS worth) into Photos, so I can back them up to a hard drive and store them in iCloud.

The big problem is that the pics have thus synced to my iphone. It's especially annoying for the pics with dodgy metadata that are now showing as 'recents' - ugh.

Why is Photos and the iCloud so complicated to understand?

That is not my question though - how do I get them off my phone without losing them in the cloud?