AirDropping a photo to an Iphone

I took a couple dozen photos of an object using my iPhone 15 Pro IOS 18.7.1. I selected the best one and airdropped it to my Mac so I could crop it and spiff it up in Photos. Meanwhile, I deleted all the photos of the object on my iPhone. When I finished editing the best version of the photo on my Mac, I airdropped it back to my phone. This is where the mystery began. My phone said the photo had been received, but it was not in Photos. It should have been at the end of the Photos Library, because I had just taken the photo that day. It was also not at the beginning of my Photos Library. It was not among the "Recent Days” Photos. It was nowhere to be found. I tried airdropping it again from my Mac to my phone. The Mac appeared to send it, and the phone said it was received. Still no copy of the photo in Photos. I restarted my phone and my Mac and tried again. Still nothing. I checked the “Recently Deleted” photos. The photos I had deleted were there, but the photo from my Mac was not.

I think I have finally figured it out. I recovered all the photos in my recently deleted folder and then airdropped the photo from my Mac to my phone. It came across to my library just fine. When the photo was airdropped from my Mac to my phone, it was going into the recently deleted photos. All the photos I had taken of the object were essentially the same, so I didn’t notice that the airdropped photo was among those I had recently deleted. In experimenting with this, I also discovered that “burst mode” photos, which is what the one I had selected was, seem to get odd treatment. I just selected a burst photo on my Mac, which I had cropped, but not all the burst copies were cropped. I think the edited photo that I airdropped back to my phone came across as not cropped, which was why I couldn’t find it in the recently deleted photos, because none of the deleted files had been cropped either.