Ok this process is really flustering me. I open the Google Photos app and see all of my photos, but none of my albums. When I enabled auto-backup, nothing was uploaded until I scrolled to each album from the app (from the on-device link), turned off auto-backup then turned it back on - overnight, some 2500+ photos went up.

However, when I open the Google Photos app, I just see the photos, none of the albums, but if I click through the menu to 'on device', I see the albums - however if I remove the photos from my device, I assume that on-device content will go empty and I will lose the album organization.

I set the photos to upload at original size, but I only see about 5GB used when it should be about 20GB+ and I would have had to purchase more storage, so it seems they did not upload at the correct resolution - what's probably cheaper is keeping a copy of my files as a backup on Amazon S3, and buying a SD card to move my photos/videos to free up space on the phone. Seems much simpler and maybe even cheaper in the long run.