I lost about 6 years of photos through boring laziness. A few years ago, I canceled my extra iCloud storage. Photos that I assumed were stored on my phone, be

I lost about 6 years of photos through boring laziness. A few years ago, I canceled my extra iCloud storage. Photos that I assumed were stored on my phone, because I was looking at them on my phone, were immediately deleted. I should have downloaded everything to a hard drive where I could see the files offline, but it was a pain(intentionally?) so I didn't.