Droidexplorer cannot find device. Galaxy Note 4

I accidentally deleted the entire photos folder on my Galaxy Note 4. My quest to recover the photos in this folder has led me here. I have installed the SDK on my PC (Win7) and droidexplorer is all set up, but it won't detect the device. Yes, developer mode is activated and yes, the USB debugger thingy is turned on. Droidexplorer sounds really super helpful, but it's not detecting my phone. I saw several other threads about platform-tools needing to be reverted to an older version, but I can't figure out how to find the version I need, and it is difficult to understand some of the posts/events/etc. between stackexchange and github because I am not super experienced with coding. I got this far because I'm not very good at giving up on things, but I am just about out of time to spend on this problem. About the device: - Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (refurbished, in case it matters - Unrooted. Not necessarily opposed to rooting the phone, but if it would wipe memory that won't work. - Running 5.1.1 I need help figuring out why droidexplorer cannot find my phone. Do I need to replace the platform-tools folder? Is it something else? Is the damn thing too old for this? Thanks to anyone who is willing to help.