thats what i initially thought (i went through with it knowing i have other family members with copies) but i can still access the files on my tv and I can see that the storage is taken up currently. still unsure how to get them off of the particular partition the files are in

actually just found out that samsung tv’s run on tizen, which is linux based. I ended up reformatting the drive and on EaseUS i can see that the partition containing the photos is there and although windows says its empty, EaseUS says most of it is used (~100 GB), and is also formatted in NTFS. Going to see if I can get these off, thanks for your help!