789-How to retrieve data from old time capsule

My son accidentally deleted thousands of pictures from Photos and I only discovered that after the 30-day grace period in "recently deleted" ended. Since iCloud doesn't have the pictures anymore, all my Macs are not showing them either and there is no backup to fall back on. My hope was that I would be able to restore something from one of the 2 old Time Capsules that I stopped using around 2017. They must've had a backup of one of my Macs and I was hoping that there could be old pictures in the old iPhoto application or otherwise backed up. The problem is that I cannot connect either one to any of my Macs. I obviously don't need to use them to create a WiFi network (as I did years ago), I just want to connect and see what data the capsules have. I followed all the setup instructions and even went through recommended resets (pressing the reset button while plugging in the Time Capsule - this does make the Airport Time Capsule visible in AiPort Utility but ends up giving "an unexpected error occurred, please try again". The same thing happens with both capsules on 2 different Macs. What could be wrong? I have an Ethernet cable connecting the capsule to my Mac (I also tried connecting the Ethernet cable to my router but still cannot see the capsule in AirPort Utility even resetting while plugging in). Can you recommend a way to get to the data in the Time Capsules? I thought maybe my ~5yo Macs are not compatible with these old Time Capsules anymore but even an old Mac cannot see them. Are you aware of any service that could help me to access data from an old Time Capsule (assuming there is no way for me to access it from my Macs). It was a big disaster to lose those pictures so any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks a lot in advance.