okay so in order to be able to back up my 'new' pictures to my google drive backup without going over the [whatever] terabyte limit and having to pay up, I've transferred all of the 'old phone' pictures to an external hard drive.
now i just need to convince myself to go all the way and delete them off my phone.
We should also note that most of these pictures are already (probably) on google photos. and amazons one that I had for awhile. And the microSD they were on in the first place from the old phone.