Thanks. I have a new podcast and her post is helpful. It matches my experience in the past with iCloud Photo Library and checking images.
A very weird thing happened this morning… I had the thought that maybe I would just leave iCloud photos turned off on the Mac and just use AirDrop to send over new photos as a temporary solution. Then at some point go ahead and just start a scratch library and redownload them all. I took a photo just to do a quick test to send the photo over from iPhone to Mac to confirm the ease of transfer, metadata, etc. Fully expecting a dead simple process but before I could send the photo over it popped up on the Mac Photo library. I looked. I blinked. I laughed. Then I deleted a couple of garbage photos on the iPhone that I recently took to share something in Messages. They disappeared from the Mac a minute later. Took another photo on the iPhone and it popped up on the Mac.
At this point I looked in Photos preferences on the Mac to confirm that iCloud photos was not on… the state I left it in yesterday when I was prompted to purchase more storage. Okay, iCloud photos is off as I left it. But it’s updating as if it were on.
So, I guess for now I’ll leave it be. I have no idea what to make of it.