Xiaomi and MIUI: where are my pictures?

I own a Xiaomi Redmi 9 phone. It is a decent phone, it does its job, and I’m quite satisfied.
Sometimes I do backup my photos from the phone to my hard drives, yes, I don’t do put them in the cloud!
But today I was not really happy: once I plugged the USB cable, I was unable to find out all my albums and photos. Of course, I knew they were there, but where?
It turned out, after a deep introspection, that for some reason the MIUI Android Operating System stores the pictures into a strange path within a folder called MIUI, in particular into MIUI/gallery/cloud/owner. Please note that there is a cloud subfolder even if I don’t have the cloud sharing enabled, I suspect the application has been defined with an hardcoded path because the cloud sharing is probably the most often used setup.


This behaviour reminds me some kind of vendor lock-in, so that one day you will find out it is easier to interact with your phone by some sort of Xiaomi application, but until then I will still use my own Linux tools to access my data locally!