HELP! I have accidentally deleted all my wedding pictures!

I know, I should have probably kept few backup but my external drive whit a copy of all the pictures broke a few weeks ago and now ... CCleaner has deleted the entire folder "Download" on my MacBook Air.

All my life's pictures were there! Wedding included!

Is there any way to try to recover the folder? Any software I should buy to recover my precious pictures? The reason why it cancels the entire folder is because, for some reason, the field called " User Download" was ticked.

I was in shock when I have found it out and now I need to get them back before my wife is releasing that.

Please Please Please help!!

Thank you

By no means am I proficient in Macs and sadly this forum is very light on Mac users.

But to throw some ideas around, what about the Trash, anything in there?

And don't Macs have Time Machine on by default?

Let me guess - it was but going to your now broken external drive???