Can't get photos off Touch 3g

Question

tl:dr I have a lot of pics on an older iPod Touch that I can only look at but not actually do anything with, and for some reason are no longer on my iCloud; I want to back up these pics so I'm not worried about the only copies being on a unit that could die any day.
full version:
I had a 4th gen iPod Touch some time ago, and took a lot of photos with it. A friend gave me a second-hand 3rd gen Touch, and when I signed in under my Apple ID it automatically grabbed all the photos that were on the 4th gen. The 4th gen got stolen, but I still had the pics. All this was over a year ago.
The headphone jack on the 3rd gen is completely screwed (I was using a Bluetooth speaker to listen to music at work), so recently I finally got a 5th gen Touch that I can actually listen to properly. For some reason, the older pics never got added to the 5th gen when I initialized it, and when I look at my iCloud photos on my laptop, all I see are the pics I've taken on the new unit. I have about 230 pictures on the 3rd gen that I don't want to lose, but I can't find them anywhere else.
And here's the part that makes this even worse, from the moment all those pics got backed up to the 3rd gen, they existed in this weird sort of limbo, where I could view them and I could organize them into albums, but I couldn't delete or edit any of them. this ***** because there's a lot of pics there that I really really want to delete, but at least I still have the ones I want.
I don't want these pics to vanish into the ether if (when) the 3rd gen finally dies completely. I want the option to restore the 3rd gen so I can jailbreak it and have some fun (again, before it dies). Can anyone help me get my pictures out of limbo? Why does performing a standard backup not put these pictures somewhere I can access them?
edit to add: in iTunes I'm afraid to click "Sync Photos" for this iPod because my past experience with syncing podcasts tells me that it will DELETE all photos currently on the unit and REPLACE them with whatever folder I select, which is the opposite of what I want, so unless you're 1000% certain that this won't happen, don't say "just sync your photos".

Answer 1

but all of these are pictures that were taken with the 4th gen's camera and were initially backed up to iCloud automatically, and then automatically downloaded to the 3rd gen when I initialized it. if it was stuff that I added to it manually, I'd understand, but this is all automatic native Apple/iCloud stuff, there should just be some box for me to tick that says "hey, you know all those pictures you already backed up automatically for me before? please continue to back those up so I can keep having access to them". I repeat, THESE WERE ALREADY AUTOMATICALLY ON THE CLOUD. I don't know why they're current not on the cloud, but I have trouble believing that it's suddenly "not allowed" when it was "allowed" (and happened with no direct action on my part) over a year ago.