When recovering from a large disk, one might want to omit some files which are too big, or known to exist elsewhere, etc. Conversely, one might want to compare recoveries with different parameters, different tools, etc.

Currently, one still needs to have enough free disk space to have all these redundant files, or to have all versions of recovery. I suggest to have an option where photorec performs all the analysis, but doesn't actually write the recovered data to disk. It is simple enough, afterwards, to recover the actual files one wants by reading the xml, and most likely much less time consumptive than the original analysis. (Of course, there can also be a feature for processing a report.xml and recovering by its spec, so one can simply delete the items which are unwanted, but I assume this is a much larger feature.)