The PDR Ecosystem — Version 3

Everything Photo Date Rescue does, in one library

One Master Library. Fix and protect it, find and understand it, create from it, capture and share it — and keep control of all of it, on your own machine.

Date repair is still the foundation — but Version 3 grows it into a complete, premium photo suite. At the center is your one Master Library — storage you control — with everything else orbiting it. PDR runs locally from your Windows PC and never uploads your library to Photo Date Rescue.

The PDR Orbit

Seven things PDR does with your library — with Ask PDR connecting every part. Choose an area to see it.

Photo Date Rescue Library Drive Advisor asking how much photo and video data you have, beside a guide ranking drive types by real-world speed

Plan & Protect

  • Estimate the space your photos and videos will actually need before you commit to a drive.
  • Compare the drives already connected to your PC on capacity, free space, speed, connection and reliability.
  • See the risk in using your Windows system drive, and where a fast Library Drive beats slower network storage.
Read about the Library Drive Advisor
Photo Date Rescue dashboard with many photo sources in the left rail and confidence-scored date analysis across the library

Restore

  • Bring folders, ZIP archives, external drives and Google Takeout exports into one workspace.
  • Every photo gets a confidence-scored date recommendation, labeled by how the date was found.
  • Runs are applied as copies to a new location, so your originals are never touched.
See how Restore works
Photo Date Rescue Albums, where one photo can belong to several collections without the file being duplicated

Organize

  • Memories replays the whole library as a chronological timeline.
  • Albums let one photo belong to many collections without ever duplicating the file.
  • The People Manager clusters faces on-device — name someone once and the name flows through PDR.
See Memories, Albums and People
Photo Date Rescue Search & Discover filtering the library by date, location, person, camera and metadata, with a details panel

Discover

  • Find photos from the vaguest clue, then combine filters to narrow it down.
  • A details panel for people, camera, exposure, location and tags.
  • All of it read from your own metadata, on your own machine.
See Search & Discover
Photo Date Rescue collage editor with a layered layout, text effects, dividers, alignment guides and glow and shadow controls

Create

  • A design studio for layouts, frames, crops, per-photo effects, dividers and layered backgrounds.
  • Multi-page carousels at sizes like Instagram's 1080×1350, with a safe zone and Magic Resize.
  • Family Trees built only from your own data, with library photos attached to the people in them.
See collages, carousels and trees
Photo Date Rescue Screen Recording with two live camera views over the dashboard — a circular webcam bubble and a second rectangular camera view

Capture

  • Record your screen with resizable webcam bubbles, and up to two live cameras at once.
  • On-device virtual backdrops, blended mic and voiceover, and manual or automatic zoom toward your clicks.
  • A separate Screen Capture tool grabs the whole screen or a region you select, with no recording at all.
See Screen Recording and Capture
Photo Date Rescue Sharing: exporting finished photos by drag-and-drop into another app, with Send to Phone and Print / Save PDF

Share

  • Send to Phone transfers over your own Wi‑Fi with a QR code and a LAN transfer — no cloud round-trip.
  • Print or Save PDF to local and network printers.
  • Copy an image to the clipboard, or drag several files straight out of PDR into another app.
See Send to Phone, print and drag-out

Ask PDR connects every part

Built on Security · Privacy · Ownership — the foundation everything sits on.

Your working Master Library can live on a suitable internal drive, an external Library Drive or a supported network/NAS location — chosen for the speed and capacity you need. Not every network path is equally fast, so the Library Drive Advisor helps you choose well. Plan storage and backups →

Which of these sounds most like you?

This changes the order of what follows, and nothing else. Every capability stays on this page whichever you pick. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, and no part of PDR belongs to one kind of person rather than another. The choice is not saved to your computer and is not sent anywhere — it sits in this page’s address so you can link to it, and it is gone when you leave.

Plan & Protect

The Library Drive Advisor

A serious photo library deserves a serious home. Before you commit years of memories to the wrong place, the Library Drive Advisor helps you estimate the space you'll need — across photos, videos and every source — then looks at the drives already connected to your PC and compares them on capacity, free space, speed, connection type and reliability. It flags the risk of using your Windows system drive, distinguishes a fast working Library Drive from slower NAS or network storage, and explains the trade-offs between NVMe/M.2, SATA SSD, external SSD and budget HDD, so you can pick a permanent home with room to grow. It's guidance, not a setup wizard — never a stream of "next, next, next".

Photo Date Rescue Library Drive Advisor: a Plan Your Library step asking how much photo and video data you have, beside a guide ranking drive types by real-world speed to recommend the right Library Drive
  1. Answer one honest question. Roughly how much photo and video data do you have in total — external hard drives, personal cloud, memory sticks, NAS, old phones, cameras, old laptops? An estimate is fine; PDR adds a buffer.
  2. Get routes in order, with the trade-off spelled out. An internal SSD, an external SSD on a fast connection, freeing space on a drive you already own, a large external HDD, or splitting the collection into batches — and what each one costs you.
  3. Real-world speeds, color-coded. NVMe M.2 at 1,000–5,000 MB/s down to cloud sync at 1–20 MB/s, so the options that will make your library feel slow are obvious before you buy anything.
  4. You keep the decision. “This is guidance, not a blocker” — you can still choose any Library Drive you like. PDR only makes sure you choose it knowing what it means.

Work out the capacity you'll need →

Restore

Dates, filenames, exports and safe copies

Add sources — folders, ZIP archives and external drives, including Google Takeout export structures — into one workspace. PDR reads date signals from EXIF, video metadata, Takeout JSON, filename patterns and folder structure, then gives each photo a confidence-scored recommendation labeled by how the date was found. Apply the run as copies to a new location: your originals are never touched, duplicates are skipped, and you can choose to write the corrected date back into the EXIF.

Photo Date Rescue dashboard: many photo sources listed down the left rail with confidence-scored date analysis and a per-source breakdown, applied as safe copies
  1. Every source, analyzed together. Thirteen folders, archives and drives are loaded here — holiday folders, a Dropbox folder, a 762 MB grab bag — and PDR treats them as one set: 1,287 photos and 126 videos, 4.1 GB.
  2. Confirmed — 1,164 (82%). The date came straight from the photo's own embedded metadata. Nothing was guessed.
  3. Recovered — 184 (13%). No usable metadata, but a structured filename pattern gave the date away. PDR tells you it did this rather than quietly writing it.
  4. Marked — 65 (5%). No reliable date was found. These are renamed by fallback rules and flagged, not invented — so you can come back to them.
  5. Duplicates — 19. Hash-matched copies of files already in the run, skipped rather than written twice.
  6. Where the result lands. The Output panel names the destination, shows the 4.1 GB the run needs against the 1.0 TB free after it, and lets you set the photo format. 1,413 files ready to process — written as copies, with your originals untouched.

See exactly what happens when you run a fix →

Organize

Memories, Albums and the People Manager

Memories relives the library as a chronological timeline, and Albums let one photo belong to many collections without ever duplicating a file. The People Manager detects and clusters faces on-device — name a person once and that name flows through PDR, including into Family Trees. A folder of files becomes a library you can actually navigate.

Photo Date Rescue People Manager: on-device face clustering grouping photos by person across the whole library

Set up Albums, Memories and People →

Discover

Search & Discover across your library

Search & Discover finds photos from the vaguest clue, with a details panel for people, camera, exposure, location and tags. Filter and combine those signals to surface exactly the moments you're after — all read from your own metadata, on your own machine.

Photo Date Rescue Search & Discover filtering the library by date, location, person, camera and metadata, with a details panel
  1. Start with one word. “Sunset” typed here takes this library from 472 items down to 60.
  2. Filter by how sure the date is. Confirmed 469, Recovered 1, Marked 3 — so you can look at exactly the photos whose dates still need a human eye.
  3. Narrow by place. Country and city, plus a GPS switch for photos with coordinates, without them, or both — all read from your own files.
  4. Always see what's left. “60 photos · 0 videos of 472” updates as you stack filters, so you never lose track of how far you have narrowed.
  5. Then read the file's own record. Filename, original name, date, confidence and where that date came from — here, Google Takeout JSON — plus type, size, dimensions, camera, exposure and location.

How Search & Discover works →

Create

Collages, carousels and social posts

The focus of the 3.0.x line is a genuine design studio. Arrange layouts and frames, crop and add per-photo effects, style dividers and layered backgrounds, and use a full text studio with per-word and inline multi-color, fonts, effects and a format painter. Build multi-page carousels at sizes like Instagram's 1080×1350, with an IG safe-zone, alignment guides and Magic Resize. Every export goes through the same engine that draws the editor, so what you see is pixel-for-pixel what you get — ready for social posts, marketing and printable gifts. Work is auto-saved as an editable project, and finished images land in the "PDR Collages" album.

Photo Date Rescue collage editor with a layered layout, text effects, dividers, alignment guides and glow and shadow controls
Collage studio
Photo Date Rescue multi-page carousel editor with per-page slides sized for social posts
Multi-page carousels

Make a collage or carousel, step by step →

Create

Family Trees

A signature, differentiating surface: build family trees and attach library photos to the people in them. A focus-person model with generation and branch controls and sibling/extended-family panels connects faces across generations. Relationships always come from your own data — never guessed from the layout — and trees export to PNG or Print-PDF. No DNA, no surveys, no cloud.

Photo Date Rescue Family Trees: a focus-person tree with generation and branch controls and library photos attached to each person

Build a Family Tree from your library →

Capture

Screen Recording for tutorials and demos

Record your screen with resizable webcam bubbles — up to 4×, and up to two live cameras at once — plus on-device virtual backdrops (blur, portrait depth, pixelate, scenes, a brand palette or your own picture). Switch to a Cam-only full-screen mode, blend mic and voiceover with system audio, and use manual or automatic zoom toward your clicks. Content-protected blur regions keep private details out of frame, and every backdrop and effect runs locally. While you record you can also grab still screenshots without stopping. And because you shouldn't have to record just to take a screenshot, PDR includes a separate Screen Capture tool that works on its own — grab the whole screen or just a region you select, no recording required.

Photo Date Rescue Screen Recording with two live camera views over the dashboard — a circular webcam bubble and a second rectangular camera view

Record your screen, webcam and voice →

Share

Send to Phone, print, copy and drag-out

Move finished work wherever it needs to go. Send to Phone transfers over your own Wi-Fi with a QR code and a LAN transfer — no cloud round-trip. Print or Save PDF to local and network printers, copy an image to the clipboard, or drag-and-drop multiple files straight out of PDR into any other app.

Photo Date Rescue Sharing: exporting finished photos by drag-and-drop into another app, with Send to Phone and Print / Save PDF

Send a photo straight to your phone →

Keep control — Security · Privacy · Ownership

  • Local-first working — the desktop app runs entirely on your machine; your photos are never uploaded or retained
  • On-device AI — face clustering, captions, background removal and image enhance all run on your computer, never in the cloud
  • Workspace Recycle Bin — deleting a photo, collage or template is a soft delete you can restore; only a permanent delete reaches the OS Recycle Bin
  • Safe by design — date fixes are written as copies, so your originals always stay exactly as they were
  • You own it — your library, your device, your data; no account is required to start

Who it's for

One ecosystem, many ways to use it

Families

Repair decades of mis-dated scans and phone exports, let the People Manager name everyone, and build a Family Tree with real photos attached to each person.

Creators

Turn your library into Instagram carousels and collages in the design studio, then record polished tutorials with Screen Capture and share them anywhere.

Small businesses

Produce on-brand marketing posts and printable pieces with WYSIWYG export, and record product demos with virtual backdrops — all without a subscription to a cloud tool.

Archivists

Consolidate Google Takeout exports and exported photo libraries into one Master Library with confidence-scored dates, then keep Albums and Memories consistent without duplicating files on disk.

Ask PDR

A built-in companion that connects every part

Not sure where something lives? Ask PDR sits in the app's Help & Support and lets you type a question in your own words — like "How do I get my photos in?" or "Where do my collages go?" It searches PDR's own curated, built-in help and shows the single best answer, plus up to three related answers, each with a link to read the fuller guidance in the right place.

It's completely offline: there's no download, nothing is sent to the internet, and it never invents an answer — every reply comes straight from PDR's built-in help, so nothing leaves your computer.

Getting started & guidance. New to PDR? The website Guides walk through migrating from clouds, phones, scans and social apps, and the Support page answers common questions. Inside the app, an "update available" message shows the release notes each time PDR updates itself.

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Try the whole ecosystem

Start with the full Windows desktop trial, or try the free web demo first.