Getting Photos Out of PDR and to Other People

Drag a photo straight into another app

Anywhere you can see a photo in PDR, you can usually pick it up and drop it somewhere else — an email you are writing, a browser upload box, a chat window, a document. There is no export step, no temporary folder and no second copy: what lands in the other app is the original file from your library.

Drag works from four places:

• Search & Discovery, in Grid view. This is the one that surprises people: search for “beach, 2014, Mum”, then drag the results straight into the thing you were writing.
• Memories → By Date, from the date grid.
• Albums, from the photo tiles inside an album.
• The Viewer, either from the Share button in the toolbar or by dragging any thumbnail out of the filmstrip along the bottom.

Videos come too. Every one of those surfaces treats a video tile exactly like a photo tile, so a clip drags out the same way a still does.

Two places do not offer it, so you are not hunting for something that is not there: the List and Details views inside Search & Discovery are not draggable — switch to Grid — and neither is the Needs Dates screen, which is a work queue rather than a viewing surface. Fix the dates there first, and the photos become draggable everywhere else.

The one drop target to be careful with

PDR asks Windows for a copy when you drag. Applications honor that. File Explorer does not — it applies the standard Windows rule instead, which means a drop into a folder on the same drive as your library is a move, and the file leaves your library.

If a file has already gone walkabout this way, it has not been deleted, only relocated — and the same rules about relinking and rescanning apply as in building a master library.

Send to Phone, with a QR code

Send to Phone puts a QR code on your monitor. You point your phone’s camera at it, tap the link that appears, and the photos are there in the browser ready to save. There is nothing to install on the phone, no account on either device, and nothing is uploaded anywhere — your PC serves the files directly to your phone across your own network for a few minutes and then stops.

The details worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Both devices must be on the same Wi-Fi. If your PC has no local network connection, PDR will tell you rather than fail quietly.
• No internet needed. The transfer never leaves your network, so it works on a plane, in a cottage with no signal, or on a network with no route out.
• Up to 200 files in one share. More than one, and the phone page offers a single Download all archive as well as saving them individually.
• The link expires after 15 minutes, and closing the window stops the share immediately. Keep it open while the phone downloads — a live counter shows you how many have landed.
• One share at a time, and the address carries a long random token, so the link is not guessable and does not outlive the session.
• Videos work too.
• If the phone cannot reach the page, it is almost always Windows Firewall — allow Photo Date Rescue through and try again.

Send to Phone is available from Search & Discovery, Memories → By Date and Albums. It is not in the Viewer — use the Viewer’s Share drag instead, or go back to the grid.

This is the natural last step after making something: build a post or a collage, then send it to the phone you actually post from. That workflow is covered in making social media posts.

Parallel Libraries: handing over a whole set

Dragging is for a handful of photos. Send to Phone is for a couple of hundred. When you want to give somebody everything — every photo of your sister, every shot from 1998, the whole of a grandparent’s album — that is a Parallel Library.

This one is ours. The Parallel Library is a Photo Date Rescue invention and it is unique to PDR — plenty of photo apps can export a folder of files, but the idea of picking out exactly the set you mean and handing it over as a whole, dated, verified library that the other person can read without the app is not a feature anybody else set out to build.

Narrow your library down to exactly the set you mean, in Search & Discovery or in an Album, then create a Parallel Library from it. PDR copies those files to a drive you choose — a memory stick, an external disk, a network share — and lays them out in dated folders as it goes.

• You pick the folder depth: year, year and month, or year, month and day. Anything PDR could not date goes to an Undated folder rather than being dropped or guessed at.
• Every copy is hash-verified, so a file that arrives damaged is caught at the time rather than years later.
• Duplicates can be skipped by filename or by actual content, so re-running onto the same stick tops it up instead of duplicating it.
• Your originals are untouched. Copy is the default; move is a deliberate choice.

What does not travel, and you should know before you send one: a Parallel Library is files and folders, and only files and folders. Your albums, captions, tags and named people stay in your library — they are not written into the copy, and there is no manifest or database alongside it. A Parallel Library is also deliberately kept out of PDR’s own search index: it is an export you are giving away, not a second library the app keeps track of. If you want a genuine second library on your own machine, that is a different feature entirely.

Which one should you use?

• A few photos, right now, into something you are already writing — drag them. Fastest, no dialog at all.
• Photos you need on your phone — Send to Phone. Up to 200, no cable, no cloud, no app on the phone.
• A whole collection for another person — Parallel Library onto a drive you can post or hand over.

All three share one assumption: that the photos are correctly dated in the first place. A Parallel Library sorted into year folders is only as good as the dates underneath it, which is why it is worth organizing the library before you start handing pieces of it out. If you are also making a copy for safekeeping rather than for a person, that is a backup, and it works differently.