How to get my photos back on my iPhone?

I lost my iPhone a couple weeks ago and it ended up dying on me so I couldn't track it. Thankfully someone at my school eventually found it and was able to return it to me but it said I had to restore it to factory settings to get it to work again. When I did this though it wiped out all my pictures and contacts. I was able to recover all my contacts thanks to iCloud but half my pictures are still gone because I hadn't hooked up my phone to my computer since I got to college in June. Is there any way for me to recover those pictures or are they gone forever?

Go to iCloud.com and try something out if you kept your phone backed up to iCloud, otherwise you're stuck. Too old a backup obviously won't help.

Have you considered entering "photo recovery" into google? I see tons of results, but find the usefull information is not easy.

Well, you say your photo was deleted unexpected, I found this article about photo recovery any-data-recovery.com/recover-photo.htm can solve your problem.

My friend, those pictures must be important and are full of beautiful memory, so please do not give up and save new data into your phone, or those pictures will be overwritten and gone forever.
now search one photo recovery software to help you. I suggest you to use Leawo photo recovery. It is easy to use. It will help you!

Technically speaking, each time you sync those files between your iPhone and iTunes, all previous data are automatically backed up by iTunes and saved as a file called (.sqlitedb). This special backup file will be continuously updated along with the later sync, and that file can't be viewed or taken out unless you use some special tricks. That's what this iPhone data recovery tools (see below) is designed for, using advanced algorithms to make lost the data alive.

Connect iPhone to computer, and then open "Computer", iPhone should show as a drive letter there. If not, please follow these instructions: In iTunes, right click on your iPhone and select "iPhone Options". Under the "iPhone" tab, make a tick in "Enable Disk Use". Click OK. Unplug your iPhone, then replug.

Now follow steps below
Step1: Download this data recovery software, then install and launch it in Windows machine correctly.
http://www.facebook.com/...436?v=info
Step2: Sync your iPhone with computer. Then you should see it shows as a drive letter in 'My Computer' like H:/.
Step3: Select iPhone drive letter and then click "Next", you will find all your lost files in the lists.
Step4: After the automatic scanning, it's time to finish all the steps by clicking "Recover" easily to Recover your files!