Technically, nothing is ever truly "gone" from a hard drive. It's just fragmented into smaller bits all over the hard drive. Sorta, kinda.
It's theoretically possible to always recover lost data as long as the hard drive itself works, but... it may cost a pretty, pretty penny.
And it may not be worth it in most situations, sadly.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure this is one of those situations where it simply isn't worth it @schattenjaeger.
I have already started the long, slow process of downloading from Google photos, editing them and putting them in folders again. The ones I've already used I won't bother with and the ones that have nothing to do with Steemit but are lost will just have to remain lost.
There have been a lot of lessons learned over the last couple of days!
Ugh... I hope it all works out. Sounds tedious, but if it can be done, you'll find a way to do it if it is worth doing.
Best of luck.
Yeah. After moaning in some comments and then writing a post about it this afternoon, I knuckled down and started again.
After that I started to feel better.
Thank you for your support @schattenjaeger. I appreciate it! 😊