@Kyrne was able to help me in the chat rooms. Looks like I needed to install:
sudo apt-get install php7.2-gd
That Got everything going well and I was able to upload.
The next step is figuring out how to increase upload sizes. I added client_max_body_size 60M;
to my nginx.conf and that allowed bigger images (1.8M test image) to work but I am still getting errors with 14M images...
Any ideas?