retrieving photos from photo library reddit – Info Mac

Hello all, I’m not sure how serious of a problem this is but I’m freaking out a bit at the prospect of all of my photos possibly being deleted.

Basically I was following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVeUNFJHnhI it was in the process of the “preparing to copy to…” stage when I accidentally closed the window and it seemingly cancelled the process. I went to my photo library on my mac and it was empty and said that it attempted to repair itself. I check my external HDD and I see that there is a “Photo library” icon in it and I try to select that as the Photo Library to use, but it will not let me select it.

Any ideas on how to go about handling this situation? The photos were not uploaded to iCloud and there were no TimeMachine backups.