How do I recover MY lost phone images?

[AC Question]

Here's my situation. I own an Alcatel Fierce One Touch 2, and these are facts I can give:
- Under Metropcs, but not connected
- Got it from my cousin; only other person who owned it before me (from my knowledge)
- Found a sd card in my mothers car, and placed inside my phone (only has 2gb internal memory)
- Told me to format sd card, which I did (formatted my whole device)
- Trying to recover all my lost data, specifically docs and photos (mostly downloaded images)
- Phone formatted before when my cousin gave it to me (to my knowledge)

I haven't bought a recovery program, yet; mainly because I'm having the same issue with all recover programs: ALL THE PHOTOS SHOWN ARE IMAGES I OR MY COUSIN HAVE NOT SAVED, AND IMAGES THAT ARE MINE WEREN'T ORIGINALLY SAVED TO THE PHONE. These said photos were saved on my pc 2 years back, but they show as some of the lost images that I can recover.

I Have heard to not mess with a formatted phone at all, to keep the files from being overwritten. The only things I have done so far are this:
- Rooted the phone
- deleted apps I don't use that come with the phone
- automatic updates to certain pre-installed apps (not much choice)
- downloaded google images (thought images would be in there; could be why said images appear on device)
- downloaded recovery app (didn't work; uninstalled)
- synced my two gmail's

Is this issue common, are the preview photos wrong, or is it something else? I really appreciate any help I can get; I have a lot of photos that I desperately want to recover. I can also tell you what the images are if said info is needed.

I know this is long, but I feel I should go into detail. Thank you in advance.

 

[chanchan05]

Basically, sounds like your photos weren't saved into Google, hence they're lost forever. Not really sure how formatting the card ended up formatting the phone though.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Something isn't quite adding up here. I agree with chanchan05, formatting the SD card shouldn't lead to the whole phone being factory reset as well. When you formatted the SD card, did the phone restart and then go through the whole Setup Wizard again?

As an aside, whenever a phone is transferred from one person to another, it should always be properly factory reset before the transfer. This means that the original owner should first go to Settings>Accounts, select their Google account, and remove it. Then do a factory reset. The new owner can then go through the Setup Wizard and add their own Google account.

 

[AlphaTango414]

With the above posts, formatting the SD card does not result in the phone being formatted. Most phones do have an option to format the SD card when you are doing a factory data reset on the phone but not visa versa.

Your only option is to run a recovery program and what it picks up is all that's there still. If it's retrieving some pictures but not the ones you are looking for, it seems they are lost and unretrievable.