Vanishing Symlinks? Symlinking inexact image files?

[Harlen333]

I'm trying to put this question out anywhere to see if it's even possible to recover, about willing to accept the loss of a bunch of photos but here goes:

I came across Czkawka while looking for a way to clear up tens of thousands of images from a space, and it worked well for that.

I started lowering the tolerances on the image search to catch more duplicate images in slightly different forms, and eventually it started grouping images that were clearly not the same image, understandable.

In guides that I watched, it said that in situations where you have groups and you want to keep both, you mark both and symlink them, this makes Czkawka not group them again.

I started noticing that all but one of each image per group was being vanished, I wasn't deleting them but they appeared to be gone after the symlink.

I started doing research in order to find my lost photos, and found that symbolic links more or less turn one file into a copy of and a shortcut to another file elsewhere, not ideal as what was linked together in each case were two or more different images.

As stated, I cannot find these symlink files that lead to my remaining file either. If I am not able to restore the old photos out of these symlink files then I would at least like to get rid of the shortcuts I made out of them.
As an experiment I also tried this on a few copies of images I made to see where they went when linked. I couldn't find them anywhere either, and when I removed the originals and checked the folders with the invalid symlinks scan nothing was picked up.

Is my computer filling up with invisible files? Did I effectively permanently delete those files with no hope to restore them? Or is there a way to reverse this is I can find a list of symlinks somewhere. All help is appreciated, I hope I'm not being too much of a bother.

I've looked inside of C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent for .lnk files because I read that symlinked files take on that name, and that the .lnk files could be found there, there were tons of link files to many more files and images than I had linked myself, so I reasoned they weren't the links I was looking for.

[Harlen333]

It may help me to know what Czkawka does internally when selecting two files and symlinking them, does it essentially remove one file and put a symlink to the other file in its place, or did the original file get changed to be a symlink in a way that can be potentially undone?
There's still the matter of having to research strange command prompts to show lists of symlinks on my computer, they seem to not be visible under normal circumstances.
It seems unlikely that the software wouldn't store the destinations of these newly created files in a log somewhere, is it possible to crack into that and read about where things went/what happened to them?