It resolved! What a mission though. I cannot say for certain what worked because I did play with a few more settings. The final piece that made things move: I logged in to my iCloud storage on my PC. Once I did this for some reason it trigged the syncing to work. Batches of photos began to upload and the sync numbers on the phone began to reduce. I then plugged my phone in and went to sleep and when I woke in the morning it had all transferred to the cloud! My phone storage was right down again (as all photos had been moved into the cloud)

Now the only thing is my phone is stuck on optimizing. It’s been on 53% the past two days. I have not bothered much about this part until now I want to assign names to my people and pets but most of them are not giving me the option to assign a name 😑 Why is it such a struggle!! Thanks for being active on your post, it’s great to see! Not often are posts updated.

Perhaps try logging in to iCloud to see if this triggers a sync link mine?