Photos disappeared

It is hard to guess, why the photos on your Mac have vanished. Can you give us a bit additional background information, please?

What has recently changed on your Mac? Did you upgrade to a new system version? Is the version shown below your question still the current version or did you recently upgrade to a newr version? The most recent version is macOS 10.15.5 Catalina.

Or did enable iCloud Photos on some of your devices? Could it be that iCloud photos is now enabled on your Mac and an iPhone or iPad, and you deleted photos on one of your other devices?

Have you moved the Photos Library to a different location? Where is the Photos Library stored?

Sometimes, after a system update, it can happen, that Photos will switch to a default library in your Pictures folder, if it cannot find or access your main Photos Library.

Try the following, to check your Photos Library.

• Quit Photos, if it is running.
• Hold down the options key, while launching Photos again.
• Release the Options key ⌥, when you are seeing the Library Chooser dialog. Then look for a different library in the panel. Try them all in turn to search for the missing photos.

Updating the system does usually not help with missing photos, unless you have recently downgraded to a previous system version and the older system cannot open the newer library.

• Have you checked the Recently Deleted album, if your Photos are still there? This is described here: Get help with missing photos - Apple Support

If the missing Photos are no longer in Recently Deleted, look through all your folders on your Mac, if you can see an additional Photos Library, that is not shown by Photos.

You are sure, you have not deleted any photos on an iPhone or iPad, that may have deleted Photos on your mac as well? Or removed photos from "All Photos" after adding them to an album? Albums do not store photos. Even if you add a photo to an album, it has to remain in All Photos, or it will be deleted everywhere.

This is what I have notices with the # of photos on my Iphone. They disappear. Does iPhone software purge "older" pictures in the Photos icons to make space capacity available , due to lack of storage space on the iPhone itself. That is the only attributing factor I could think of in my case. This happen to me with the previous version of iPhone also. The number picture from my Paris trip in 2009 was reduced to less than 30% remaining, when compare to what I had took back in 2009. ... AND, in recent weeks my used storage space was closed to the max , I went back to see the # of pictures in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. They are much less in average # than the year 2019, 2020, the average # are 4 times or 5 times of those older years. The rate of my photo habit did not change. Can someone from Apple develop confirm if this is a hidden build in function to make space on the iPhone for user please. Thank you.

I also thought it was a storage issue when I was using a 16GB iPhone 6. Now I am using the iPhone Xs with 256GB and the same thing happened. So I don’t think it has anything to do with storage. This happened some months ago and though very painful, I managed to move on. Today, I wanted to change my WhatsApp wallpaper and I saw the missing photos in my photo stream but I couldn’t find my photo stream in the photos app. So I contacted Apple support and they said to turn off photo stream and turn it on again. I did that and now I can’t even find them on WhatsApp anymore. I’m in tears right now.