I'm sorry you've lost your photos. Now's as good a time as any to read up on backups and how to do them. iCloud is not a backup - as you've just found.
For home users a so-called 3-2-1 strategy is a good start: 3 copies of your data using 2 different backup methods with 1 copy kept away from your home - e.g. at your folks' or, as in my case, in a metal shed at in my garden. 2 methods, in my case, means that I use Time Machine and I also do a plain copy of the files in case I end up having to copy my backups to a non-Apple machine which might have trouble reading a TM backup. Have a search in Google for backups and start doing them so you don't lose stuff again.