I want to move my photos to my hard drive but not transfer the pictures in the albums
Because then it deletes them off my phone.
Is that possible?
Pictures in albums do not exist separately from the photo library; they are just “pointers” (links) to the originals in the photo library. So it is not possible to delete photos from the photo library but still keep them in albums; anything you remove from the library will also be removed from the albums they appear in. The good news is that because of how albums work, they don’t take any extra space.