ICloud – Turned off iCloud, but still deleted the photos from all devices

It's not entirely clear, but I'll take a guess.

If you connect the phone to a computer and no photos are removed when you sync, the most likely setup is the iPhone is using iCloud Photo Library.

You would turn that off in the settings app - iCloud.

Then once the library is off - choose whether you want the phone to participate in Photo Stream / Photo Sharing or not.

At that point, once iCloud Photo Library is off - you can delete photos from the phone manually on the iOS itself or by connecting to iTunes / Image Capture app / Photos app on Mac / iPhoto on Mac and transferring / deleting photos en masse.

• How to delete all photos in the camera roll in iOS 8.x?
• Understanding Photo Stream

I recommend restoring those backups. iCloud Backups are compressed to save memory. Just because they show lesser GB than the full amount of your photos and videos may have, doesnt mean that they arent there. Also backups are done over time, so the photos and videos are also saved over time, never all at once.

I would restore from a backup and see what you have. Also when the latest backup was installed, did you have iCloud library turned on in iCloud settings? If so did you have optimize storage turned on? You'll want that off if your iPhone has enough storage for your photos.

And lastly make sure you go to www.iCloud.com since all photos that iCloud can send to your iPhone will come directly from there as well as your backup. See if you can verify that before giving up on the backups.