Disappointed

I guess no one had an answer for you or wants to be the bearer of bad news

The files were 'deleted'. Clicking Delete doesn't really doesn't delete the file, it just marks the space they took as available for the system to write to. If the drive was immediately pulled and sent to a data recovery center they may have been able to recover the photos. Cost will start at a few hundred dollars. An alternative is for the home user to try to recover files themselves, often times using free software. That works sometimes. It all depends on how good the software is and how much of the deleted files have been overwritten. It didn't work in your case.

If the drive continued to be used, it's quite possible some of the cluster containing parts of photos had been overwritten. Thus making the photos unrecoverable. If you corrupt a single cluster of data, you can't reconstruct the photo.

Personally, I've been able to recover files using paid-for software. Those times when I was able to recover files, I was able to recover probably about 50% of them. Also, these were files from failed hard drives, not files that have been deleted by the user.

Bottom line, if you want the files, you're best off leaving it to the experts. There are several companies who do this type of work. Drive Savers is a well known resource.