Short answer: Potentially, yes.
A bit longer answer: The reason you’re not seeing it show up under the “Option-click” Time Machine menu is because macOS doesn’t recognize the raw drive as an active Time Machine *destination* anymore. Instead, you need to browse the sparsebundle disk images that Time Machine stored on it.
See if the following will work for you:
- Open Finder and browse the external drive. You should see a folder called Backups.backupdb or possibly a sparsebundle disk image, depending on how the Time Capsule was set up.
- If it’s a sparsebundle, double-click it — macOS will mount it as if it were a virtual drive.
- Inside, you’ll see a structure of dated folders for each backup set. You can browse those in Finder directly.
- To properly use Time Machine’s interface, hold Option while clicking the Time Machine menu, then select Browse Other Backup Disks… and choose the mounted sparsebundle.
This way, you can restore files (including your photos) using the normal Time Machine interface, or just manually copy them out of the backup folders. If for some reason the sparsebundle doesn’t mount cleanly, you might need to use Disk Utility → Mount Image to force it, or even run `hdiutil attach` in Terminal.
