iPhone 13 pics

[jasel1978]

I deleted everything on my old iPhone 8 Plus. I downloaded all my pics from Photobucket, Flickr, also YouTube files and stored them on the phone.
I turned my iPhone 8 on a couple months later to transfer the pics to an external hard drive.
when I did this, the number of pics rapidly declined from 41,000 down to 18,000.
iCloud couldn’t help either time I called.
They don’t know what happened to them.
Can a data recovery service to recover these photos that I had on my phone at one time?
Thanks

 

[ThatTechyGuy]

Hmm, did you have iCloud Photo Library enabled?

In that case, iCloud syncs your library across all your devices, so if you delete them in one place it deletes them everywhere.

 

[jasel1978]

Hmm, did you have iCloud Photo Library enabled?

In that case, iCloud syncs your library across all your devices, so if you delete them in one place it deletes them everywhere.

I had them stored on an empty iPhone.
It was the phone I had before my current phone.
Everything was deleted off of phone except the pics. The phone had no service. It was only a storage device at that moment.
I went through the pics for 20-30 minutes to arrange them and get ready to download to an external hard drive..
After around 30 minutes, they just started deleting themselves.
After I turned the phone one on, I stayed in same room. I started freaking out, googled everything I could and even turned the phone off.
They just kept disappearing.

 

[jasel1978]

After I turned the phone on*

 

[ThatTechyGuy]

Hmm that's strange. Did you have them in the files app, or in Photos? Or perhaps something else? I guess what I am asking is what application were you in when you were organizing them?

 

[jasel1978]

Hmm that's strange. Did you have them in the files app, or in Photos? Or perhaps something else? I guess what I am asking is what application were you in when you were organizing them?

I thought photos app. When I get home later I’ll plug that phone in and check once it gets a little charge.