How to recover disappeared Photos on my MacBook Pro

Have you checked the recently deleted /hidden/album folder in your iCloud Photos? They might be moved to these folders.

Also, you can check Data Recovery option in iCloud to see if the photos are recoverable.

If nothing is there in your iCloud, do you have a Time Machine backup? It should be the easiest way to recover photos on a Mac. If not, you will have to use a data recovery program, PhotoRec is free to use, Disk Drill and Cisdem is high with recovery rate, you can find the tutorials online.

With iCloud Photos, if you delete a photo anywhere, that is taken as a request to delete it everywhere - including from iCloud.

I hope you didn’t manually delete some of your photos from a device synced to iCloud Photos, thinking your actions affected that device only.

Have you tried looking to see if there is a Recently Deleted album, and if so, if any of your photos are in it?

Joy217 wrote:

I didn't delete any photos. I came in a few mornings ago and launched Photos and the pics were just gone Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get to them through back-up. I may be doing that wrong (retrieving the photos off of the backup, but the photos library was not found. As that is what I am hoping for, but I haven't resolved that.

Did you ever play around with multiple Photos Libraries (by holding down Option when launching Photos)?

If you did, is it possible that you created and selected a new Photos Library – and your photos are in another one? Seems like a long shot, but in that case, they wouldn't be gone – you'd just need to re-select the library they're in.

You can always restore from your backup that you keep of your device data. Perhaps you removed the images unknowingly from your device?