If you have an album that is already stored locally, i.e. the album icon in the albums list has the blue circle with a down-pointing arrow on it, AND the "Only download Smart Previews" is UNCHECKED, that should indicate that the originals (if they exist in the cloud) have already been downloaded. You can confirm this easily enough with some simple maths, i.e. tap on the tri-dot icon for the album and then tap on the Clear Cache option. Don't worry, that won't do anything without a confirmation, but what it will do is produce a message that will tell you how much local storage will be released if you proceed with the Clear Cache command. So then you can do the maths....you know the number of images in the album, and we know that a smart preview will vary between 1 and 2MB in size, so multiplty the number of images by 2 to reach the largest size in MB of the total of the cached images if they are stored in Smart Preview form. The actual album cache size should be significantly bigger than that. If it is, it does likely mean that the images ARE stored locally as originals, but if it's not more then the store locally function isn't working correctly. In which case, try turning off the Store Locally option and then turn it back on again to force the originals to download. If that still doesn't work, use the Clear Cache command, after which you'll need to re-enable the Store Locally option to hopefully get the originals correctly downloaded.
I can't emphasise enough that even when originals ARE stored locally, you will always see the "Loading Original" message if you tap on the cloud icon after selecting one of the images. If you leave the cloud icon alone and just watch the behaviour of the icon you should see that there's a very brief showing of the spinning blue circle, which shows while the smart preview is being loaded. That spinning blue circle should quickly be replaced by the white (or very light grey) circle with a checkmark inside....that indicates that the smart preview is loaded, and at that point you can start working on the image, no need to wait for the next stage. You may then notice the moving dots on the cloud icon, which typically mean that there's some uploading/downloading action going on, but in this scenario it's also used to indicate that the original is still being rendered in the background. Eventually, that circle changes to a solid green colour with checkmark which indicates that the original is fully loaded.
Move on to another image, and that process should repeat. Move back to the first image, and again that same process should repeat, i.e. there's always a "loading original" period, even when the original is already stored locally.
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