files retrieved with photorec should be mostly pictures, but appear to be txt files

I have an external hard drive that we stored our pictures on. Well after installing ubuntu i thought that i could boot off of the partition that I made. So i went into the bios and had it load from what i thought was the partition and tried to run system restore on what turned out to be the external drive.
the computer didn't even recognize it any more. i took it to the shop down the road and they said to send it to a data recovery service. i decided to see what i could find online about it.
i found someone that used photorec and testdisk and got all the pictures back.
i ran photorec and got a bunch of stuff, but it looks like the pictures were somehow converted to txt files.

how do i convert them back to photos? Orwhat can i do to recover them correctly?

i also ran testdisk to try and repair the partitions i got two to show up, but the main one(with pics) won't mount.
i get this message
Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_mst_post_read_fixup: magic: 0x15030e07 size: 4096 usa_ofs: 8705 usa_count: 5381: Invalid argument
Actual VCN (0x322113536331013) of index buffer is different from expected VCN (0x5).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdg1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.