I also had the same experience as you did and it was really troublesome, I
thought I had backed up my iPhone but it seemed that I hadn't. I could not
find my photos on iCloud. I searched on Google and it gave me a lot of
answers. I then landed on a page that offered a solution on how to retrieve
photos from iPhone. You may check it out below:
<http://www.iphonedata.net/iOS-Data-Recovery/how-to-retrieve-photos-from-iphone-208.html>