Strange new Photos issue on my iPhone 15 Pro

[DaveWT]

I have a Mac Mini (updated to latest macOS) with ALL my photos in the Photos App. I have an iPhone 15 Pro (updated to the latest iOS) with (until recently) only a TINY subset of my photos. I do not use iCloud for my photos. I do NOT want ALL my photos (or even thumbnails of those photos) on my iPhone.

On my Mac:



On my iPhone:



Note that this is reflected in the amount of iCloud storage in use in the screen shot above.

On my Mac, I have photos going back to 1947 (slides that were digitized and saved in Photos. But suddenly (and I didn't notice exactly when this happened) these photos appeared on my iPhone as well. And clicking on a year (say 1947) brings up the "Days" and I can see photos from that period.




If I then click on a thumbnail of one of those photos it opens but there is no trash icon to get rid of it, unlike opening a photo taken recently (the tugs in this example.)




So can anyone shed a clue as to what happened, what I clicked on to create this mess and how I get rid of these unwanted images on my iPhone?

 

[DaveWT]

An update to this story with a lesson! I was on to Apple Support for over an hour yesterday and the support guy had real problems at first trying to resolve this. Most of the 14,000 + images that were recently added to my iPhone, could not be deleted. I was even willing to delete my entire photo Library on the iPhone if that would clear it up, but he couldn't seem to get that to happen. Several times he put me on hold to ask a "higher power" but still we got nowhere. Then he asked me "how many tabs do you have open" and had me swipe up from the bottom to reveal all the apps that may have been opened once or twice but were still leaving a tab open. I am sure I have been advised in the past NOT to close those tabs as it takes more resources launching an app again, then just leaving those tabs open. But he had me close all of them. After that his directions to delete all photos in the library was successful and I could then airdrop the few I really want on the iPhone from my Mac's Photos Library.