Who I have the same questioned this solution

Your best option (IMO) is to use the USB  to computer link and just copy all your photos to your desktop or to an external drive.  And I would highly recommend using Google or One Drive rather than Verizon cloud for cloud storage if you still need to put the photos in the cloud.  Me?  I'd prefer to keep the photos on my computer, burn them to a DVD, and if I wanted them to share on my phone, upload to Google storage only those that I really needed on my phone.