Joe, thanks, interesting--
In direction of phone to photos desktop it's fine. Take image on iphone will appear on photos desktop quickly.

But if I copy from my hardrive to photos desktop - nothing moves. Now my desktop and laptop are not on wifi, but corded ethernet to internet (which is faster and more reliable than wifi), should be same then --. Other than that I'm clueless.

I got a stopwatch and it was 1 min 10 seconds to log into icloud and upload those 16 images. Thanks for the perspective, which I lose.. I hate logging into Apple, but the stopwatch does not lie. Its' not that long.