Trouble with importing photos from iPhone to Mac when I have enabled iCloud Photo Library and selected "Optimize iPhone Storage" I have enabled iCloud Photo Library and selected "Optimize iPhone Storage" on my iPhone. There are 20000+ photos and videos in the "All Photos" album on my iPhone, but since the storage of my iPhone is only 16GB so most of the photos and videos on my iPhone are not full-resolution copies. Now when I connect my iPhone to my Mac and try to import all the photos and videos to a blank library in the Photos app, it says there are only 200+ photos available for importing. Is there a way I can import all the photos and videos on my iPhone to my Mac?

Note that I don't want to turn on iCloud Photo Library on my Mac Photos app, because at some point I will reach the storage limit of iCloud Photo Library and I will have to start deleting photos from it, and I don't want to lose the local copies of them on my Mac. 

My situation


My iPhone has only 16GB of storage and it fills up quickly because I take tons of photos and videos. I don't want to import them every week, and I also want to look at photos or videos from one or two years ago, so I purchased 200GB of iCloud storage and enabled "Optimize iPhone Storage". This works great.
I want to incrementally back up the photos and videos to an external hard drive which hosts my Photos library.
I’m not sure I can address everything in your post, but here are some things that might help narrow down some options.


If you have “optimize photos” on your iOS device/iPhone - then it is designed to upload the full, original images to iCloud. Full stop.
Then you are expected to download those photos to all other devices from the ful version in iCloud. 
At best - you always get the perfect version and the downsampling only happens to the local / non-permanent copy that’s on a device with low storage space internally.
At worst - you fill up the iCloud space and have to buy more to store all the originals - and you still retain the full size versions online, but at a cost.


Depending on where you split from this general idea - you may or may not have some issues that I didn’t anticipate, but I would probably reach out to Apple Support to verify your iCloud is correct and full and see options to get everything from the phone to iCloud, everything from the Mac to iCloud and then sort out the options.

Getting the local cached copy from the iPhone is very against the design so I would think you’d need specialized skills or software much more involved and time consuming than just fitting into the intended use pattern.