Photos I've recently taken have disappeared from phone and cloud

Question

I was home visiting family and we took a few photos before I left. I reviewed the photos while we were all standing there. This is important, because I know they were (at least momentarily) saved to the phone. The next time I looked at the gallery was on the drive home. For some reason, I couldn't see them in my Google photos album, but I could see the thumbnails and the loading bar near the top of the page to show me they were being backed up to the cloud. A little strange, but since we were out of service range when the photos were taken, I just figured they'd appear in the album again once they finished loading to the cloud. WRONG. I've checked everywhere. The trash can, archives, the file manager app on my phone...the photos literally disappeared into thin air. Any ideas on how I can retrieve them? I haven't seen that side of my family in almost 3 years, and it'll be a long time until I see them again. Only 3 photos from the visit, but it's all I had. It's so upsetting. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Edward Tuller · Accepted Answer

AndroidCentral had a fix that worked for me. 
Go to Application manager> Media and Devices App> Storage > Clear Cache. Then Force stop the app and restart the phone. The photos repopulated the gallery when I restarted.

Greg Gambone · Accepted Answer

Alicia, 
 
The Google Photos app does not automatically delete any of your pictures. Nothing gets deleted unless you intentionally and manually choose that option. So, even if your pictures were not completely or successfully uploaded to your Photos library, the original image files would remain accessible on the device. 
 
If you did not manually delete the pictures, they should still be in the Camera/DCIM folder on your phone. If they are not there, the Google Photos app is not to blame for this because, again, the app is incapable of deleting anything unless you purposely choose to do it. 
 
My suggestion is that you verify storage capacity and test for errors on the phone's SD card and/or internal memory. 
 
If your pictures are not visible on the Google Photos website, then they have not been successfully backed up. In this case, there is nothing that Google or any of the volunteers in this forum can do to help you get them back. Google can't help you recover files it never had in the first place. 
 
Regards,
~ Greg