Depending on what types of files you wanted to recover, Photorec may not be your best recovery option in a case like this where your filesystem and device is still fine, and you just want to recover accidentally deleted files.
Photorec is a tool that, at its most basic level, works on the assumption that all information about the file system structure may be gone, and all it can do is find meaningful fragments of data in the partition that resemble files.
Thus, what it does is scan through the partition, a sector at a time (in almost all cases a filesystem cluster should start on a sector boundary even if it is more than one sector in size), and looks for signatures ("magic numbers") which would indicate the start of a particular type of file. When it finds one, it uses its knowledge of the structure of that type of file to estimate where the file ends.
Text files have no well defined header structure (except that their contents look like text, eg they avoid null bytes, bytes over 0xf7 and bytes below 0x20 apart from carriage returns, line feeds and tabs). This may lead to a lot of segments within files being misidentified as plain text files, so if you have text file identification turned on in Photorec it may result in a lot of false positives.
Photorec should be able to identify video, audio and image files in the partition, and in the case that the files aren't fragmented, will be able to recover the whole file. This is where it excels.
Because of the way it operates, Photorec typically can't recover the filename or folder structure of the files it finds.
There is an accompanying program to Photorec called Testdisk which is also a data recovery program, but operates at the filesystem level - that is, if you accidentally delete a partition, it will search through your device and find partitions and recover them whole - which would allow recovery of all data.
The best solution in your case, however, would be to have had backups of the lost files and restore them from backup. Second to that, however, would be to try some recovery tools specific to the filesystem you are using, that may have some better luck identifying file and folder structure of the deleted files. The ability to do this varies by filesystem, with the ability to recover intentionally deleted files seen as a possible security issue depending how you look at it.
For ext4 (and ext3), not much useful information is kept about deleted files, so in some cases you need to resort to something like Photorec. However, some people have luck recovering recently deleted files from the filesystem journal using ext4magic, the manpage of which is here
