iCloud I'm confused

[roxics]

I've got one of those stupid 32GB iPads because I wasn't smart enough to pay more for more memory. A few years ago when it filled up I signed up to iCloud to offload stuff automatically. Now I'm trying to get all of that off of iCloud and onto my mac. So I decided to sync it with
Photos app on my mac. Download originals. It says it did. But when I look in my finder, the Photos library databased says it's only 4GBs and iCloud says my photos are 23GBs, and if I right click on the library tab on the left column in the Photos app and select "get info" it also says my library is 23GBs.
So I'm confused, why is finder saying it's only 4GBs?

To make matters worse, when I go and watch my videos in the Photos app, the finder library sizes increases, but sometimes it also decreases, but it doesn't increase or decrease by the size of the video file itself. For example watching my 5GB video, doesn't increase the size by 5GBs, only by about 100MBs. So what is going on?

I want to be able to erase everything off of iCloud (since it's full) and be sure I have a full quality copy on my mac. But right now I don't think that is the case. Even though it says I have everything. The file sizes just aren't matching up. I know one of my videos alone (5GBs) is larger than the entire database file (4GB) in finder. So that doesn't match up.

Does anyone know what is going on?

 

[fatTribble]

Are you certain that all of your photos are in iCloud? If you go to iCloud.com can see everything?

I’m asking because you mentioned your iCloud is full. Maybe not everything uploaded?

Just curious, what’s the motivation to get rid of iCloud? Wouldn’t you want an offsite copy of your photos?

 

[roxics]

I have other offsite copies of my photos.I want to clear up space so I can have backups while using the ipad. I only hae the 50GB plan and don't want to spend more.
Yeah I checked iCloud.com and all of my photos are there. It gives me the same number my Photos app gives me. Both in number of photos and total file size. The only thing wrong is the database file in finder that reads 4GB.