Recover photos lost by a restore operation?
The main thing to note is...
Restore does not merge old &amp; new data. It replaces one with the other.

At restore, any information currently on the device will be erased.
This applies to any device, phone, computer etc. On a computer with a regular hard disk, forensic software may be able to recover some lost data. On a flash-based storage device, let alone one like an iPhone which uses hardware encryption, this data is gone forever.

This can be something of an issue if you have important data &amp; need to restore from an earlier backup.

For photos etc, the simplest way to be able to re-merge afterwards would be to save them in Photos, or use Image Capture etc before restoring the older backup. You could then use iTunes to re-add them afterwards, in effect as 'new' data.