How do I selectively sync photos to iCloud from my laptop and view them on my iPhone?

I have icloud. I am trying to use it for back up of my photos. So I installed on my laptop. icloud says it synced but a lot of my photos on the laptop where not uploaded to the cloud. I can not figure out how to selecitvely sync the photos to the cloud. I also can not view them from my phone and the folders i made on my laptop to organize the photos are not showing up when I open iphoto on my phone. I thought the point of cloud storage was to view on any device.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]