About two months ago (just over 60 days so they are no longer in Trash), I manually deleted thousands of photos off my Google Photos account due a problem I had with duplicate files. I had a back up of all the photos on SD cards which I needed to clear. I moved the photos to an external hard drive. Later, I discovered that Windows had somehow decided to not copy about 1600 of the files.
The only trace I have left of the missing photos are the cached images on Google Photos on a broken android phone (LG G3) which I've turned on without any access to the internet. Even if they are low quality, I am desperate to recover these photos. Does anyone know how to access the cached photos (or thumb nails) of Google Photos?
My plan, if I can access them, is to create a wifi hotspot with another android phone without access to the internet and use something like airdroid to move the images to a computer. I could also maybe put an SD card back in the phone and move the files there instead?
The phone is not rooted. I've looked around using the file manager but have not been able to locate them. Does anyone have any suggestions?