Usage of “to” and “from” in my sentence

Question

Is my sentence grammatically correct?

I asked from the friend who took this picture, had you ever seen anything like this before?

or should it be:

I asked a friend who took this picture, had you ever seen anything like this before?

Answer 1

Out of the two, the more correct sentence would be:

I asked a friend who took this picture, had you ever seen anything like this before?

But, to take the grammatical corrections a bit further, "have you ever" is a better choice than "had you ever", because you're asking if the friend has seen anything like it up to this particular point in time. Also, it should be "the" friend rather than "a" friend, because there you are referring to a specific person (if there were several friends that took several different pictures, "a" would be acceptable, but the use of "this picture" means a one-to-one correlation between picture and picture taker). Finally, the quotation to the friend should be in quotes. It is a direct quote, as opposed to an indirect quote. So overall the sentence would be:

I asked the friend who took this picture, "have you ever seen anything like this before"?

If you make it an indirect quote, it is:

I asked the friend who took this picture if he had ever seen anything like this before.

Answer 2

I asked my friend if she had ever seen anything like this before.

would work better.