Cant see photos but still taking up storage

Hi guys im sorry if this is long / doesnt make sense at times but ill try my best to explain this. Back when i was in college we were given adobe accounts and i used that on my iphone to take photos on the Lightroom app. after my account ran out i was still able to use lightroom to take photos and edit them. A few months ago i ran into an issue where if i was connected to the internet when i was on the gallery page a white page would appear but nothing would load on it and every time i would exit out of it it would just come back. The whole time using lightroom it had been taking up space on my phone. quite a lot, its currently taking up 40GB, since it was taking so much storage on my phone i figured it was stored locally and would be able to switch accounts and upload them all to the cloud so my phone would have free space. So earlier today i logged out of that account, signed into my main adobe account and purchased a 1TB cloud plan to be able to upload all of the photos. However, none of the photos i had taken were on the new account (obviously) but anyway I logged back into my college account, (the same account that had all of the pictures saved to) and they were all gone. Despite this Lightroom still takes up 40GB so i figure they are still on my phone but they are unaccessable. I then plugged my phone into my computer to be able to somehow access the files.  I went through File Sharing and went to the lightroom tab where there is a folder that is 36gb. it does seem to be 2 months old which i dont know why but anyway when i try to save the folder to my computer it comes up with an error code (-4) So anyway the photos must still be downloaded to my phone but are completely unaccessable and i really dont want to lose them as its years of photos.