Aunt Nini When Tonfotos accesses the file, it will be downloaded, but will it be kept or not - this all depends on particular cloud and thier application. Some may only keep files locally for smal amout of time after you access file, some may keep it longer, clogging your internal drive. Probably, that can be tuned in settings. In any case, Tonfotos cannot control this. I would suggest you just give it a try and see what happens.
You can definitely put your files to hard drive, but I am not sure if this is optimal solution - you will end up with two copies of your files that are not syncronized automatically.