Recover photos which disappeared after moving them between albums (Samsung Galaxy S21)

Question

Today, I was trying to curate a selection of photo's of my friend in my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S21). During that process I accidentally moved photos to the wrong album and then the images disappeared from my phone. These photos are important to me, can anyone help me recover them?

What I did that caused the photo's to disappear, I:

1. opened the Samsung gallery app on my phone
2. created an automatically generated album with all photo's of my friend.
3. created a new, empty album in which I wanted to curate the photo's.
4. selected in the automatically created album the best pictures of my friend.
5. moved the selected pictures from the automatically generated album to the album of whatsapp photo's (I selected the wrong album to move the photo's to by mistake).

I moved about 20 images. Of one specific image I know the content and creation date well and used that image to try to figure out where the images went. Where I looked so far is:

1. The whatsapp folder I moved the images to. I went to the place in the album where I expected the image (based on its creation date) and it wasn't there.
2. The thrash folder inside the gallery app. This only contained 1 unrelated video, not the images.
3. Since that specific image was sent to me via whatsapp, I went to the original message where the image was sent to me. There the image was shown as not downloaded and when I clicked on it to download it, it gave an error and whatsapp suggested to ask the original sender to send it again. The images within that whatsapp message thread before and after apeared as normal. Only this specific image which was part of the images I moved was unavailable.
4. Finally I also looked through the 'recent' album in the gallery app and also didn't find the image there where I expected it based on its creation date.

For other users, things I should have done (but didn't do) to prevent this issue:

1. I shouldn't have moved the images, but copied them.
2. I should have set-up a cloud back-up of my images.

Is there anything I can do to try to find the images? Or to even understand what happened here? I am a developer by trade (although not a mobile/Android developer), so I am comfortable with potential solutions that go beyond the UI of the phone. Is there anything I can do at this point?

Answer 1

Several days later, I rechecked the gallery app without changing anything and the photo's reappeared. So I guess waiting is the answer, at least I got my photo's back.