Photos library – importing photos from DSLR camera – missing Masters directory (macOS Catalina)

Before a sync or restore, I believe that iTunes will create a backup of your phone's contents (unless you manually cancel this backup). The backup will contain the photos and videos that were on the phone.

You can check if a backup was created by doing the following:

1. Launch iTunes
2. iTunes > Preferences > Devices
3. See if there is an entry with the date of the restore.

If a backup exists, you can recover your data with one of two methods:

• Restore your phone using that backup; or
• Use an application such as iPhone Backup Extractor to extract the images out of the backup file.

Photos expects you to export unmodified originals as copies, to preserve the integrity of the internal file management and for collection protection in the same way a database works – it's central to keeping the iCloud storage of your photo collection synced, stable, and functional.

Once you have exported a photo, you can then use mdls and mdfind to see what the "copy" looks like and where the original was stored.

In my case, they are all in ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters/2015/04/08 and such stored by year, month and date for my US locale computer. You'll only have to do this exercise a few times to nail down the internal storage for each time Apple chooses to change it going forward.