Live Photos and using space

Apple provides each user with a limited amount of space in the icloud and then adds an app that consumes large chunks of that space compared to a regular photo. Turning off this function - LIVE PHOTOS - is easy enough once you realize what had happened but by then you have large amounts of these in your photo album that is using up precious space. Turning off the LIVE information does not seem to reduce the information/data used and reverting an image to a regular photo and removing the extraneous data is burdensome and Im still unclear if that reverts it back to a normal sized photo. This is frustrating. Our family has multiple Apple devices - iphones and Ipads (4 are in constant use) and this adds up to large amounts of data that need to be stored. The option of course is to purchase more cloud space which is a need that apple created largely as a result of these huge files that now have to be stored. This seems to me to be an unfair practice. THEN there is the idea of taking some of the photos out of the cloud and putting them on an external storage device and Apple does not make that easy either. Its not like I can plug in a USB drive and move photos over to the USB for later retrieval so I can get extraneous items out of the cloud and maintain enough space to back up my devices. Anyway if there is an easy answer (other than purchasing more icloud space), I would love to know.