entire photo library deleted

My entire photo library suddenly was deleted from my first gen Apple TV, apparently by iTunes, while I was adding some music. I scrolled back to My Photos to select the default music and found that I no longer had any photos (synced with Photos). While it takes an eternity to add photos to Apple TV, apparently it takes an instant to remove them. When I moved to Photos in iTunes, it was deselected, as were all the albums I had chosen for transmission to Apple TV. This is a first gen ATV, with a hard drive that is supposed to store photos, is it not? I had this same problem with my original 1st gen ATV and just replaced it with a new one - it sync'd the photos beautifully (unlike my dying old machine) but this same anomaly has cropped up. Needless to say, it is beyond annoying to have to reload photos that are supposed to be stored on the ATV hard drive.