Ask PDR
Type a question in your own words. Nothing you type leaves your computer.
Checked against Photo Date Rescue 3.0.11 on Windows. Everything below describes the shipping build, including the parts we are not happy with.
Ask PDR is the help built into the app. You type a question the way you would say it, and PDR shows you the answer it already has written down, with a link to the fuller explanation. It is the fastest way to get unstuck without leaving what you were doing.
It is worth being precise about what it is, because the name suggests something it is not. Ask PDR does not write answers and does not think. It searches 125 questions and answers that were written by hand and shipped inside the application, and shows you the closest ones. That is a genuine limitation — and also the reason it can never invent a confident, wrong answer about your photos.
At a glance
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How do I open it? | Ctrl + / anywhere, the ✦ in the title bar, Help & Support, or a button you can keep in the corner. |
| Does my question leave my computer? | No. Nothing is sent anywhere. It works with the network unplugged. |
| Is it a chatbot? | No. It finds pre-written answers. It cannot make one up. |
| What if it doesn't know? | It says so and points you at support, rather than guessing. |
| Does it know about my library? | No. It answers questions about PDR, not about your photos. |
Opening it
Three ways in, all landing in the same place:
- Ctrl + / from anywhere in PDR. This is the quickest, and it works while you are in the middle of something.
- The ✦ button in the title bar, at the top of the window.
- The ? menu, where it is listed as Ask PDR.
All three open the Help & Support panel with the question box at the top, already focused, so you can start typing immediately. The box reads “e.g. how do I get my photos in?” until you do.
And a fourth, if you would rather not leave the screen you are on
Those three all take you to Help & Support to read the answer, which is the right place for a long one and the wrong place if you are halfway through building a collage. So there is a fourth way in that answers you where you stand.
In the ? menu, the Ask PDR row has a checkbox on the right. Tick it and a small Ask PDR button appears in the bottom right corner of the window and stays there — on every screen, and still there after you close PDR and open it again. Press it and a panel opens over the corner of whatever you are doing: type a question, read the answer, close it. Nothing moves and you do not go anywhere. Untick the box and the button is gone.
It is off until you ask for it, and PDR draws nothing at all in that corner until you do. Each profile remembers its own answer, so turning it on does not turn it on for everyone who uses the computer.
It does not have to stay in the corner, and the panel does not have to stay that size. Drag the button anywhere in the window and let go, and it stays where you put it — useful on Collages, where the options live down the right-hand side, so the left is the better home for it. Drag the corner of the open panel to make it bigger or smaller. PDR remembers both, so the next time you open it, it is where you left it and the size you left it. The panel opens away from the nearest edge, so wherever you park the button the panel opens into the screen rather than off it.
On a PDR window too small to show the size you chose, the panel is drawn to fit the room it actually has — and the size you asked for is kept, not overwritten, so it comes back in full the next time there is room for it.
If you have not used it, PDR occasionally offers it on screens that have nothing on them yet — an empty album, say. If you find that irritating, there is a setting to stop it: Show the ‘Ask PDR’ tip on empty screens.
How it decides what to show you
Type a question and PDR breaks it into words, drops the ones that carry no meaning (“how”, “the”, “my”), and scores every one of its 125 stored answers for how well it matches. It understands a modest set of synonyms, so asking about things being “private” also finds answers written about “cloud”, “upload” and “offline”, and it matches on word beginnings, so “recording” finds “record”.
You get up to four results. When PDR is confident, the top one is marked “Best answer”. When the match is thin it drops that badge and says “Not sure exactly — here are the closest matches”, which is your signal to reword the question or read further down. Each answer carries a Read more link that takes you to the full section it came from.
The answers are fixed text, not generated. Every word Ask PDR shows you was written in advance and shipped inside the application. It cannot rephrase an answer to suit your question, it cannot combine two answers, and it cannot reason about your particular situation. The upside is the one that matters: it is incapable of confidently inventing something false about your photo library, which is the failure that makes AI assistants risky for this kind of work.
Your questions do not leave your computer
Nothing is sent anywhere. There is no server behind Ask PDR, no account, no API key and no model. The questions and answers are part of the program you installed, and the matching happens on your own processor. Your typed question is never transmitted, never logged to us and never stored between sessions.
You can prove this to yourself in about ten seconds: disconnect from the internet and use it. It behaves exactly the same, because there was never anything on the other end. See what leaves your computer for the complete list of connections PDR does make — Ask PDR is not on it.
When it does not know
If nothing matches, Ask PDR tells you: “I couldn't find that in the built-in help yet. Try rewording it, browse the topics below, or open When to Contact Support.”
That is the whole failure mode. It does not hang, it does not time out, it does not produce an error, and it does not offer you something unrelated while pretending it is an answer. If you see that message, the question is genuinely outside the 125 it holds — try plainer words first, then contact support.
Known gaps in 3.0.11
- The app calls it “the offline AI helper”, and that label is wrong. Hover the ✦ button and that is what the tooltip says. There is no AI in it — no model, no generation, nothing learned. It is a search over text we wrote. We would rather correct the label than live up to it, and we have logged that as a defect against the app rather than quietly matching the wording here.
- It knows about PDR, not about your library. It cannot answer “how many photos do I have from 2003” or “where did that album go”. Every answer is general.
- It cannot see what you are doing. The results do not change based on the screen you are on or the state you are in, so a question that only makes sense in context may not land.
- It has no memory. Each question is answered on its own. You cannot ask a follow-up like “and what about videos?” and expect it to know what you meant.
- Wording matters more than it should. Because it matches words rather than meaning, an unusual way of describing something can miss an answer that is sitting right there. If you draw a blank, try the plainest words you can.
- 125 answers is a real ceiling. It covers the common ground well and thins out quickly beyond it.
How to check this page is still true
Every claim here describes behavior you can observe in the shipping build. If something
on this page does not match what PDR does on your machine, that is a defect in one of the
two, and we want to know:
contact support. Tell us the anchor — for example
/help/ask-pdr#summary — and we will either correct the software or
correct the page.