How can I recover my data I erased on my external hard drive

I have a Seagate external 1TB plus hard drive, last night I was trying to drag my folder on my mac(Macbook pro retina 13, 2015, just got it this month) to it but it didn't work, so I searched on Apple solution, it tells me to open the disk utility then click erase then change the setting from NTFS to Mac OS Extended(Journaled). Then everything in my hard drive is gone.
I downloaded couple recovery software but I absolutely know nothing about how to use them.
If you can help please write the details so I can follow the steps.
There's many important family photos of my childhood and my family, some of them passed away already and I would never have a chance to take a pic with. Your help will be truly appreciated.
Thank you all!!!!!

Just FYI... if you want to share your external drive between Macs and PCs, you will want to use either FAT32 or exFAT as your drive format. Macs do not natively read/write NTFS any more than PCs natively read/write MacOS Extended. FAT32 cannot have a partition greater than 32GB so you would have to partition your 1TB drive to use FAT32. exFAT doesn't have this limitation. Best to format the drive on a PC to ensure compatibility between the two.
If you will only be using this drive with your Mac, use MacOS Extended (Journaled).
Always back up your data before erasing, partitioning, or formatting a drive unless you don't care about losing the data.

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