How do i retrieve photos from my computer that got restored to factory settings?

I'm afraid you're out of luck. The time to retrieve the photos was BEFORE you restored your computer to its factory settings, which involved a format of the hard drive.

There are some data recovery programs out there that may help. I'm sure some of the more (data) knowledgeable members can comment as to what to use.

But until one of them does. Do not use your hard drive for ANYTHING. The more you rewrite over the old data the more you lose.

Recommendations:

Zero Assumption Recovery is what I use (and does a real good job) however the demo version allows you to recover lost digital images and videos (memory cards and USB thumbdrives). Or pay the full price and you can attempt to recover from all sorts of filesystems as well as RAID recovery.

I managed to recover all my lost photos from my mobile via the microSD card.

Another tool (free) is: http://www.piriform.com/blog/2012/7/17/recuva-v143

I've used it a few times and seems to be OK.

+1 recuva or you are screwed

Rule of thumb - ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP SOLUTION - it's not worth the aggravation!

I really hope that suziey is capable of retrieving those files!

not to nit-pick but when you agreed to restore it to factory a screen pops up telling you that you WILL lose ALL your data when resetting to factory. I would have took that warning as a cue to backup anything you need/want before resetting. I have used recuva from piriform.com it seemed to do an alright job i still lost 2 movies permanently but got most of them back.