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What Photo Date Rescue actually does — and where it stops. Every page below is written against the shipping build, states the version it was checked on, and ends with a Known gaps section rather than pretending there are none.

What do you want to achieve?

Pick one and we will lay out a short route — what to read, in what order, and why each step is on the list. Nothing is locked: every page in every route is also reachable on its own from the menu above.

Restore — put the real dates back

Start with what a fix does to a file, then the reference, then the same job on your own library.

  1. What Restore does to a file First, because it says what a fix changes and what it leaves alone. Everything after this assumes you have seen that.
  2. Where a date can come from The reference page. A date can come from several places at once, and this is where the ranking between them is written down.
  3. Fix wrong photo dates, step by step The same job walked through end to end, including the review that happens before anything is written.
  4. What the free trial counts Last, once you know what you would be running. The trial unlocks every feature but counts nine separate allowances, and this page lists them.

Where this overlaps: dates decide how everything else sorts, so this route stops exactly where the Organize route starts. If your dates are already right, pick Organize instead.

Organize — one library, sorted the way you think about it

See the three ways of grouping first, then the reference, then one pass over a real library.

  1. Albums, Memories and People First, because these are three different ways of grouping the same photos. Knowing which one you actually want saves undoing the other two.
  2. The reference for building the structure What each control does, so the guide can stay on the task rather than stopping to explain the screen.
  3. Organize a photo library, start to finish One pass over a whole library, in the order that avoids doing the same work twice.
  4. What the free trial counts Last, because organizing is where a trial allowance is easiest to spend without noticing.

Where this overlaps: grouping by date leans on the dates being right. If yours are wrong, the Restore route comes first — otherwise you will organize around the wrong timeline.

Discover — find one photo again

What you can search on, how each filter behaves, and what to do when you cannot name the filter you want.

  1. What you can search on First, because the useful thing to know is which kinds of search exist — not how to drive any one of them.
  2. How Search & Discover works The reference, filter by filter, including what each one is reading to decide a match.
  3. Asking in plain language For the times you remember what the photo was but not which filter would reach it.
  4. What the free trial counts Last, so you know which allowance searching draws on before you lean on it.

Where this overlaps: this is the one goal with no step-by-step guide, because finding a photo is a reading job rather than a run-once job — so the route stays inside the Help Center. What you can find also depends on how the library is organized.

Create — turn the library into something to show

What the studio includes, what each control does, then one piece built from an empty canvas.

  1. What the studio includes First, because “collage” means very different things in different apps and it is worth seeing which one this is.
  2. The collage and carousel reference What every control does, so the guide can stay on the task instead of explaining the toolbar.
  3. Make a collage or carousel, step by step One worked example, from an empty canvas to a finished file you can send.
  4. What the free trial counts Last, once you know how many pieces you are likely to make.

Where this overlaps: a collage is built from photos you have already grouped, so the Organize route makes this quicker. If the finished piece is going to a platform feed, social media posts covers the sizes.

Protect — keep the library safe, and know that it is

Work out how much room you need before deciding what to put it on, and only then buy anything.

  1. Plan & Protect in the app First, and note the name: in PDR this is one area, Plan & Protect, so it is worth seeing both halves before reading either.
  2. Work out the capacity you need Before hardware, not after. The planner turns a library size into a drive size, and that number is what decides the rest.
  3. Drives and devices What to put the copies on, once you know how much room they are going to take.
  4. What the free trial counts Last, so a trial allowance is not spent proving something you could have read.

Where this overlaps: half of this goal happens before anything is copied — deciding what is worth keeping is planning, not protection. The Protect reference covers the other half.

Share — get photos to the people who want them

What can be sent and where, the reference for sending it, then the usual routes people actually use.

  1. What can be sent, and where First, because the limits here are the useful part — what leaves the library, and in what form.
  2. The sending reference Each way of sending, written out, including what happens on the receiving device.
  3. Sharing photos, walked through The routes people actually use, in order, rather than every route that exists.
  4. What the free trial counts Last, so you know what a trial covers before you promise anyone a copy.

Where this overlaps: sharing sends copies out of the library, which makes it the one goal where it is worth reading what leaves your computer before you start.

Reference pages

These follow the life of a library in order: bring it together, correct it, protect it, copy it, add to it, organize it, find things in it again, send them to someone, and make something out of them.

Plan

Build one master photo library

Sizing the collection before you start, what happens to your files at the destination, how duplicates and collisions are reviewed and reversed, and how to leave with your originals.

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Restore

Restoring capture dates and filenames

How a date is worked out when nothing states it, what is read from Google Takeout and sidecar files, how a batch is reviewed before it commits, and what undo can and cannot put back.

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Protect

Protecting the library itself

Whether your originals are left alone, whether PDR checks its own index for damage, what survives a crash or a power cut, and what happens when files change outside the app.

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Back up

Back up your photo library

Making a second copy of your photos, repeating it to another drive, backing up the database and projects as well as the images, and restoring onto a replacement PC.

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Capture

Record your screen

What you can record and what you cannot, controlling audio and the output file, blurring things out, and what survives a crash mid-recording.

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Organize

Organize a photo library

Albums and the folder structure on disk, what gets written back into your files, finding duplicates, doing it to thousands of photos at once, and what you can take with you afterwards.

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Discover

Finding photos again

Searching on facts you can state, searching when you only half-remember it, finding a person, keeping the index honest, and where the searching actually happens.

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Share

Share photos with people and devices

Getting photos to a phone, a printer or another application, what the recipient actually receives, where the data travels, and the whole category of sharing PDR does not do.

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Photo collages

Make a photo collage from your own photos

How large a collage prints, how much of the layout and the photos in it you control, and whether you can reopen the design days later and change your mind.

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Family trees

Build a family tree from the photos you already have

Where the portraits come from, how you move the tree onto another relative, how step, half and adoptive relatives are handled — and why there is no GEDCOM in or out.

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Social media posts

Make a social media post or carousel

How PDR builds a multi-page carousel as one continuous canvas, what the exported slides look like and in what order, and the part it does not do — posting.

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Using PDR day to day

The pages above follow the life of a library. These answer the questions that come up while you are actually using the app — what it reads, what it keeps, what it sends, and what to do when something goes wrong.

Getting started

Your first hour with PDR

What the welcome screen is asking you for, the surfaces you can open from it, and how to get the guided tours back once you have dismissed them.

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Run a Fix

Running a Fix without losing anything

What PDR reads, what it copies, where the copy lands, how duplicates and name collisions are decided, and exactly which of it can be undone.

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People

Naming faces and grouping people

How faces are grouped, how you name and correct a person, what happens to a name you get wrong, and where the face data is kept.

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Formats

What PDR reads, and what it writes back

The formats it will open, the ones it will not, and precisely when a date or caption is written into the file rather than only into the library.

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Settings

Settings, and where PDR keeps its data

Every preference it remembers, how to reset them, which folders on disk belong to PDR, and what is safe to delete when you need the space.

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Ask PDR

The help built into the app

Press Ctrl + / and ask a question in your own words. What it can answer, what it cannot, and why nothing you type leaves your computer.

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Viewer

Viewing, rotating and trimming

Rotating a photo without re-saving it, cutting a clip to a new video file, lifting a subject onto a transparent background — and the one thing the Viewer does not do at all.

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Privacy

What leaves your computer, and what does not

The complete list of outbound connections PDR makes, what each one sends, and the places where a log or report can disclose your file paths.

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Licensing

Licenses, trials and updates

Activating and moving a license, what the trial counts and how it counts it, working offline, and how updates are checked and installed.

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Troubleshooting

When something has gone wrong

Getting a diagnostic log out of PDR and to us, and the first things to check when a run, a drive or the index is not behaving.

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Help, Guides or Support?

  • Help — these pages. They describe the product itself: the behavior, the boundaries and the gaps. Read one before you trust PDR with something that matters.
  • Guides — step-by-step walkthroughs for a job you are trying to finish, such as getting photos out of a cloud service or a messaging app.
  • Support — for anything these pages do not answer, or when the app is not behaving the way a page here says it should. That mismatch is worth reporting; it usually means a page needs correcting.

More Help pages are being written. Only finished, verified pages are listed here — an empty entry would be worse than a short list. If a page you expected is missing, tell us what you were looking for.