In reply to LastBoyScout:
That’s all very strange; my experience is that Apple device will warn of insufficient space and will warn before it deletes photos. There is as I understand temp use of iCloud storage to allow updates, etc, in certain circumstances even irrespective of normal storage. If you have 50Gb with only 5 used them there should never have been a need to delete anything esp without warning.
As the updates were done in an Apple store then they should have been backed up to the system.
Long shots - in photos are they in the recently deleted section by any chance?, does she have an iphone and they were synced there?
Were the photos ever in iCloud (ie the settings were such to upload)?
If so, can you log into iCloud via the internet on another machine and look at the photos? Is so download to a different machine. If they were there, but not now, there is up to a 30-40 day window to attempt to retrieve.
As re waiting overnight full syncing with iCloud as I discovered this year can take up to 48 hrs. Checking by logging in as above though will tell if they are actually in the cloud or not.
If they were in iCloud, but not now visible for whatever reason Apple do normally have cached versions for a period of time. I needed to give special permission (you are giving them access to see all the stored stuff which they normally have not ability to see) to Apple earlier this year to access my past versions of iCloud and delete the latest versions (ie essentially a roll roll back type exercise) to overcome a syncing fault with the latest data stored. This took them a week.
BTW, when contacting Apple support, for photo problems you really need to get it escalated somehow to the Creative Media Team support. They are the specialists and can do more than the normal support teams. To escalate my experience is you have to be patient and go through the normal support several times (3 in my case) before it is automatically escalated.
Stating the obvious, sorry given the position you are in, but backing up to a local pc is desirable imo. I’ve always copied photos from the iphone/ipad (albeit sometimes only once a year!!) just in case.
Hope you get them recovered.