The photo evidence you reference seems quite strong and the moon landings can be described as appearing to be real.
But the strongest argument for the moon landings is in the massive amount of trust we can place in the government and the media, in order to believe everything they tell us.
Two essential qualities producing this credibility come to mind: 1) competence and 2) benevolence.
We could also have trusted that the then USSR and China and other nation would have tattled if we had not gone to the moon.
Imagine if Putin wanted to rattle Americans’ cages by saying that the USSR knew Americans didn’t go to the moon and played along in order to get certain “concessions” from America!
Other evidence: https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/21jul_llr.html
A cutting-edge Apollo 11 science experiment left behind in the Sea of Tranquility is still running today.
The Apollo 11 lunar laser ranging retroreflector array.
Ringed by footprints, sitting in the moondust, lies a 2-foot wide panel studded with 100 mirrors pointing at Earth: the “lunar laser ranging retroreflector array.” Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put it there on July 21, 1969, about an hour before the end of their final moonwalk. Fifty-four years later, it’s the only Apollo science experiment still running.
****SNIP****
Here’s how it works: A laser pulse shoots out of a telescope on Earth, crosses the Earth-moon divide, and hits the array. Because the mirrors are “corner-cube reflectors,” they send the pulse straight back where it came from. “It’s like hitting a ball into the corner of a squash court,” explains Alley. Back on Earth, telescopes intercept the returning pulse—”usually just a single photon,” he marvels.
The round-trip travel time pinpoints the moon’s distance with staggering precision: better than a few centimeters out of 385,000 km (about 240,000 miles), typically.
Targeting the mirrors and catching their faint reflections is a challenge, but astronomers have been doing it for 35 years. A key observing site is the McDonald Observatory in Texas where a 0.7 meter (2.3 foot) telescope regularly pings reflectors in the Sea of Tranquility (Apollo 11), at Fra Mauro (Apollo 14) and Hadley Rille (Apollo 15), and, sometimes, in the Sea of Serenity. There’s a set of mirrors there onboard the parked Soviet Lunokhud 2 moon rover—maybe the coolest-looking robot ever built.