[SOLVED] How does a picture appear on the desktop but it is not on any of my storage?

[allamerican1776]

Just before I lost everything, but a honda car load of things I grabbed while evacuating during the Paradise fire, I bought a very expensive scanner to convert my life's experiences from slides and negatives to digital. I did manage to save all my sd, flash, 2tb backup medium. One day I turned on my Imac and a picture of my 2 year old son and I sitting in my dune buggy popped up, so I immediately set that as the desktop background. My son died of meningitis at 23. The next day my background was a single color usual site. I was fuming. I searched every medium I had for that picture and wasted two days just to come up empty. So I sent google a very nice feedback telling them how the practice of stealing pictures is a highly unethical business practice and should be illegal. The next time I turned on my computer that picture was back on my desktop. After searching my main backup drive I found the picture exactly where it should have been in the first place. This is no joke. I've been dealing with google about this for years. Every time I plug in my backup drive pictures turn up missing until some of my cherished folders become empty shells. Google uses the excuse that google backup sometimes does not restore your backups exactly as they were. The real reason is that they want you/me to believe that hard drives have somehow become absent minded so we have to pay them money, even though HD storage is very inexpensive, for their idiotic cloud storage. The bigger picture is this, once you sign up for cloud storage you become accountable for everything in that account, and as precedents are being set right now it will become evidence against us. Every keystroke over wireless transmission is saved with your/mine name on the account. Signing up for it will make the signer accountable. This has happened in special cases just to set precedence, but soon it will be commonplace. Who knows what the courts will deem illegal as they scour all your computer usage for the past 20 years? I'm guessing that the NSA data storage facility in Utah is the "cloud".

 

[jojesa]

I had a similar issue on an Android phone 3 weeks ago. My child background picture was gone .
I browsed thru my photos, since I knew the month and year I took it. I was using Google photos to browse and it was not there. I installed another photo app, browse thru the months and voila! the photo was there.

I wasn't worry about the photo, I have everything locally backed up, but I have no idea why the photo just disappeared and Google photos will not list that and some other photos when browsing the Google photo app.
What I found weird is that I can see the photo with another app.

 

[USAFRet]

One day I turned on my Imac

That is almost certainly a function of your Apple device and account, and content sharing across devices.