Move your data to Back into iCloud Photos
Once you have your data out of the big services and cleaned up, it needs to live somewhere you control. This guide covers moving your archive to Back into iCloud Photos.
Step by step
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Check the copy setting before you import anything
Open Photos, Settings, General, and look at Copy items to the Photos library. Ticked is what most people want: the library becomes self-contained, syncs to iCloud and backs up as one thing. Unticked is deliberate - it suits a library too big to duplicate, on the understanding that iCloud will not hold it.
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Know what it will cost in iCloud
If the setting is ticked and iCloud Photos is on, everything you import uploads and counts against your iCloud storage. Check what you have free against the size of the folder Muletto wrote before starting, rather than discovering it partway through the upload.
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Import the folder
In Photos choose File, Import, select the folder Muletto wrote, and import. Photos reads the date and location out of each file as it goes, so they land in the right place in the timeline rather than all under today.
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Check the dates before deleting anything
This is the payoff for repairing metadata first. A Google or Apple archive imported without that step arrives dated the day of import and a decade of history collapses into one afternoon. Scroll back a few years in the library and confirm before you remove the source folder.
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Let iCloud finish, and watch it finish
Uploading a large library takes far longer than importing it. Photos shows progress at the bottom of the Library view. Leave the Mac awake and on power until it says it is up to date - a laptop that sleeps halfway through simply stops, without telling you it has.
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If you skipped the copy, consolidate later
Changed your mind about referenced files? Select them in Photos and choose File, Consolidate. That copies them into the library, at which point iCloud takes them and a library backup covers them.