photos - Why different pictures are loading on boot, and images disappearing, then reappearing on its own?

I am using a non-rooted LG V20, Android Oreo I believe.

I am having a problem in which the phone randomly loads different "sets" of pictures - sometimes current photos disappear and older pictures reappear, etc. It's almost as if there are 2 root drives/internal storage that the phone randomly load.

If you see the attached screenshot below, there are 2 pictures folders of the same name under root/sdcard (Pictures and PICTURES -- I don't understand how there can be 2 folders with the same name so this is already strange).

When I open either of these folders, it leads to the exact same folder (see the screenshots below). Note the folder names are both "pictures" technically. I think this may somehow be related to the problem.

Some days when I boot, it will just load an "older" pictures folder w/ different picture count - pictures that I've stored in the past. When that happens, my current/recent pictures will all disappear and the older set is the only thing visible.

For example: right now it shows 14 files in Instagram, 3 files in Kakaotalk, 0 files in others as you can see in the screenshot.

When my older set loads, it will a whole different set of pictures, with no pictures overlapping from the above. (see below)

I can't seem to find the trigger that reliably reproduces loading of either set - although, once I remember the phone was suddenly not reading any pictures from the instagram's gallery function so I manually ran the media scanner, when the phone loaded the older set instead.

Anyone have any ideas?