photos disappeared

Hey JLSpalding,

I understand you have a concern with deleting some photos, but now all photos are missing from your MacBook Pro yet still appear on other devices.

If a photo has been deleted it goes to the Recently Deleted folder in iCloud for 30 days, unless it was manually removed from this folder as well. Here's some more information about this: Get help with missing photos - Apple Support.

If there are no pictures in the Recently Deleted folder, you can check to see if iCloud Photos is set up on your other devices that include the pictures. If so, you can also set up iCloud Photos on the MacBook Pro and these photos will sync to the MacBook. Be advised that with iCloud Photos set up, if you delete or add photos on one device they will appear on all devices that have iCloud Photos set up. Here's more information about this: Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support.

Have a great day.

Have you upgraded to Catalina MacOS recently?

Catalina changed the folder and naming structure of all media stored by Photos application.

Now they are in Originals folder, BUT Catalina messed with the older logical subfolder structure. So now you just see folders from A to Z and from 1 to 9 where ALL your media files ARE RENAMED to random long names.

Now it is nearly impossible to find your media file without PHOTOS app.