I would suggest contacting a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Kroll OnTrack. Both are recommended by Apple and other OEMs and both will provide free estimates. We used Drive Savers several times many years ago and were very satisfied with them.
As for recovering items from a drive, it becomes more difficult the more the drive is used since you may overwrite the files you want. You really need to boot from another drive to perform recovery operations, but even then macOS will be indexing the drive which may also overwrite your deleted data. Same can be true if you have AV software installed.
PhotoRec is a free program for recovering deleted items, but I'm not sure if it is compatible with High Sierra and APFS file system.
Data Rescue is a paid app I used to use for recovering data.
When the Trash is emptied all of the links to the filenames may be destroyed. So while your pictures may still be there, you may be searching through thousands of image files to find them. Why so many image files? Every webpage you visit can contain lots of small image files to form the content & layout of the page and all of these old web page images are still on your drive until they are overwritten by something else. It can be very hard to distinguish some of the images from legitimate photos.
It may even be possible to recover the photos from the failed hard drive depending on how bad the failure is. I've been able to successfully recover data from failing drives (even really bad failures) using Linux and free utilities. A professional data recovery service may be able to do so as well since they will sometimes dismantle a failing drive to retrieve data (which I don't do when I recover data). Professional data recovery services may not be as expensive as you think.
And please make sure to have good verified working backups which is even more important when you use SSDs since SSDs can fail without any warning. With SSDs data recovery is more difficult or even impossible. The more important the data, then you should have more than one backup of it.
I highly recommend you check out the professional services I mentioned as any attempts you make will make their job that much harder.
Good luck.
