New Apple Photos app and iCloud: uploading archived libraries As my macbook doesn't have enough storage for my family photos and videos, every 1-2 years I'd start a new iPhoto library, and will place the old one on an external USB disk. I have 4-5 iPhoto libraries on an external disk now, altogether it's around 180gb.

Is there any way to upload everything into the new icloud storage? I want to be able to access photos repo from any idevice I have.
Merge them into one library (iPhoto Library Manager will do this job), then upload them to iCloud by designating the combined library as System Photo Library in Photos' preferences, after opening and converting it with Photos.
Another way to merge two or more libraries is described on the Apple site:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414


  If you designate a new library as the System Photo Library and then
  turn on iCloud Photo Library, the photos and videos in the new library
  will merge with those already in your iCloud Photo Library. If you
  want to keep the contents of your photo libraries separate, don’t turn
  on iCloud Photo Library for more than one library in Photos.


Depending on upload speed, prepare for a very long wait.

And if you then/afterwards want it on your MacBook make a new empty Photos library on your internal hard drive and select it as "System Photo Library", enable iCloud Photo library and set it to optimized.  It will then download either originals, or optimised versions, depending on space available.