photos lost or move in Writer

I have 30 pages of text about my girlfriend’s life and began dropping digital phone photos in. All fine for a while and
then I began losing some of the images, or they would move to a different part of the page so the picture was no longer above its test caption.

How did you anchor the pictures? See Type tab in FormatPicture..., Anchor property. You can also check Wrap tab.

Without more detail on how images are inserted, type of image etc it is hard to say.

Perhaps you might find [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images (View topic) • Apache OpenOffice Community Forum useful for some info on using images in Writer.