Lightroom iPhone photos disappeared on sync

@ferris5star 

Turning on sync from the Lightroom desktop app may have created a different Lightroom catalog ID than the one that existed on your phone where your photos were originally located.  I wonder if your photos might still exist inside the iPhone LR app cache.

Please see this page: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/recover-lightroom-mobile-photos-itunes-file-sharing.html   It describes how to use iTunes (or Finder on newer Mac OSes) to access photos inside the Lightroom app.  In short, I hope using this method allows you to copy original photos out of the app cache to your computer.  

Are you using Lightroom or Lightroom Classic on your desktop?  I would like to see if there's a reproducible problem here that I can report to the engineers.

When you mentioned syncing to Mac Desktop, are you using the Cloud Based Lightroom Desktop or Lightroom Classic?

Either way, could it be that you are using different log in details on both?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble with Adobe Lightroom. We are here to help.

Could you please share the version of Lightroom from Help >About Lightroom and the iOS version? Did you recently delete anything? 

There seems to be an error (!) on the cloud icon. Are you running out of storage on the cloud? If you are about to or have already exceeded the storage, your recent import is yet to be fully synced.

You can also log on to Lightroom Web (https://lightroom.adobe.com) to check current Sync issues on the left part of the screen.

If there are any sync issues, click on them to know more, find the original for those images, and back them up safely before you empty the Sync issues from Lightroom Web. Sync issues usually indicate images that are pending to be synced or have metadata conflicts.

Let us know if this helps,

Regards.

Ranjisha