First of all, my iCloud storage is full.
I air dropped photos onto my computer and I choose the 'save to photos' option. Then I deleted them all(from the deleted folder too), and wanted to only send one photo back to my phone so I selected the photo and imported it, once I did this, all of the other photos disappeared from the photo app on my Mac. Why did this happen and where did they go?
Thank you
MacBook Pro 13", 10.13
That answer wasn't helpful at all. If you read the question properly you'll see that you haven't helped at all, you've just pointed out a feature of apple products, but thank you.
Answer: I'm not exactly sure why, but the next morning I woke up and all photos were in my trash box in a file named "recovered photos". So I guess if you upload a heaps of photos to the photo app by airdrop and only upload a selected few, the others will appear in your trash box?
If your phone and your computer were both connected to the same iCloud Photo Library, deleting a photo on either one would cause that photo to be deleted from the iCloud Photo Library servers, then from your Mac. That would keep them all in sync, which is what iCloud Photo Library is intended to do.
I'm sorry you did not find my response helpful. Many of the people who come here with a problem that they described in the way you described your problem have not understood the nature of iCloud Photo Library, so that information would have been on point for them.
I cannot tell you why some of your photos reappeared later as recovered photos. It may have something to do with your iCloud storage being full (if either of your devices' Photos libraries is connected to iCloud Photo Library). That seems to cause mysterious problems.
How to recover photos from airdrop.
