I'm trying to copy all my pictures from my recent vacation to my laptop,
and I found some from before my vacation that should have been copied
but were not in the Data/Photos/2023 or 2022 directory.

That was bad enough, but then I found hundreds of pictures in each of my
User/micky/appdata/roaming/myphoneexplorer/xiaomi... directory and
User/micky/appdata/roaming/myphoneexplorer/samsung... directory.

I have never intentionally put photos there. How could I have done it
by accident? I consciously always backed up to C:\data\photos\.....

(And, if it matters, I haven't taken more than a dozen pictures with the
Samsung phone for 3 or maybe 5 years.)

I do usually use myphoneexplorer to look at the phone's files, but I'm
the one who decides where to copy them to. At least I thought I was.

How did they get into appdata?

Or maybe they were stored on the cloud (what's that called?) and then
downloaded to my laptop by some cloud-related program????