Got an email saying that my iCloud is nearly full, i presume it is the pictures that are filling it up.

I've gone onto the apple site and signed in but theres no icon for pictures (photo stream) but im currently moving a lot of stuff onto my external hard drive, if i copy them straight over from the photo stream in my documents and empty the folder will this give me more room in my iCloud or does it store it else where aswell?

All I can offer is THIS..........

Seriously though, have you thought about having your own cloud????

Units from Wester Digital, Synology and others will give you more flexibility.

I switched the backup of photos into the cloud off on the phone backup settings. This just wastes space as you can back them up locally if you want and the photo stream does not count towards the iCloud phone backup limit.

Just deselect camera roll in the iCloud backup settings on the phone and then next time it backs up to the cloud (while plugged in charging and on wifi) it doesn't back up the photos.

Are you using iCloud to back up or just to sync stuff? 

 

This Apple tech article might help you to find where your free 5GB has been used http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4847