Build a family tree from the photos you already have

Applies to: Photo Date Rescue for Windows, version 3.0.4. Last verified: 29 July 2026. Every statement on this page was checked against the shipping 3.0.4 build. If you are on an older or newer version, the behavior may differ — check What’s new for changes.

This page is the reference we cite from our comparison table. Each capability below has its own permanent link, so a claim about PDR can always be traced to the paragraph that supports it. Where the answer is “no” or “only partly”, this page says so in the same words the comparison uses.

The one thing to understand first

PDR’s tree is a picture of your photo library, not a genealogy database. That single fact explains both what it is unusually good at and what it does not do at all. Nearly every other program on the comparison starts from records — names, dates, census entries, sources — and treats photographs as attachments. PDR starts from the photographs. The people on the tree are the people PDR has already found in your pictures, and their portraits are the faces it found.

Three consequences worth knowing before you start:

• You do not type in a portrait, you already have one. A person’s card shows the face crop PDR found in your library. Nothing to scan, crop or upload.
• The tree is a view, and you can have several. A saved tree stores who it is centered on and how far out it reaches. The people and relationships are shared; the framing is per tree.
• There is no research service behind it. No hints, no record matching, no online tree to sync with, and — see known gaps — no way to import or export a GEDCOM. If you already keep a tree in a genealogy program, PDR does not read it, and this one does not go back the other way.

Nothing here leaves your computer. There is no account, no upload and no publish step, because there is nowhere to publish to. That is not a privacy feature bolted on; it is a consequence of the tree being local.

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At a glance

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Drawing a tree you can read

The tree is drawn as generation rows, with the person you are focused on in the middle and each further generation on its own row above or below. Two things stop it turning into a hairball once cousins arrive:

• Per-branch lanes. Each branch gets its own vertical lane, so two sets of cousins do not interleave. Lanes are on by default. There is also an optional vertical divider drawn between families, off by default, for when you want the separation to be unmistakable.
• Distance dimming. Cards fade slightly the further they are from the person in focus, so your eye lands on the part of the tree you are working in without the rest disappearing.

The connecting lines carry meaning, not just connection. This is worth learning because it saves you clicking on people to find out what they are:

• Parent to child — a solid line, running vertically.
• Partners — a solid line between the two cards. If the relationship has ended, the same line is drawn dashed.
• Full siblings you have recorded — a solid violet line.
• Half siblings — the same violet, short-dashed.
• Siblings PDR worked out for itself, from two people sharing parents rather than from anything you entered — a thin dotted violet line. A different weight on purpose: it is PDR’s inference, not your statement.

Each card carries a relationship label worked out from whoever is in focus — “Mother”, “Half-sister”, “Cousin once removed” — so you never have to count rows to work out how someone connects. Change the focus and every label on the tree recalculates.

Where a parent is missing, PDR draws a placeholder card rather than leaving a gap, so the shape of the generation stays intact and you have something to name later. The header always states the size of what you are looking at: how many people, how many relationships.

What we have not measured: how readable the diagram stays on a very large tree — several hundred people across many generations. We have not tested that, so we do not claim it. This is the same caveat we applied to the other products on this row.

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Putting your photos on the people

This is the part PDR does that a genealogy program does not, and it is the reason the feature exists.

Portraits come from your library automatically. A person’s card shows the face crop PDR already holds for them — the representative face from your own photographs, cropped to the face box it detected. You do not source, crop or attach a portrait; if PDR knows the person from your pictures, the tree knows what they look like.

You can override that, and you can undo the override:

• Set a face yourself from a file, a screen grab or the webcam, when the face PDR picked is not the one you want on the tree.
• Remove a face you set and fall back to the automatic one. PDR distinguishes the two: a portrait you set by hand is removable, and a face verified in Photo Manager is not removed from the tree by this control.
• Give a card its own background image, per person, independently of the portrait.
• Hide faces — all of them from the Display settings, or one person at a time from the right-click menu. A hidden face becomes the person’s initials on a colored disc. The choice sticks between sessions. See export and privacy for why this matters when you share a tree.

PDR also uses the photographs to suggest who goes with whom. When you are adding a partner, it can rank candidates by how often the two people appear in the same photographs. It is a suggestion and you accept or ignore it; the point is that the evidence comes from your own library rather than from a public record set.

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Moving the tree onto a different relative

A tree in PDR is always drawn from somebody. Changing who that is takes one action and does not rebuild anything — the relationships are stored once and the view is recalculated around the new center.

• Double-click any card on the canvas to make that person the new focus.
• Use the focus chip in the header. It always shows who the tree is centered on, with their face and first name, and clicking it opens the person picker. You never have to hunt for the current center; it is stated at the top of the window.

Every relationship label on the tree recalculates from the new center, so the same person who read “Cousin once removed” a moment ago now reads as whatever they are to the new focus.

The focus is saved with the tree, so reopening it puts you back where you were. And because undo covers view changes as well as edits, Ctrl+Z steps back to the previous view — the tooltip says so explicitly when the next undo is a view change rather than a data change.

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Following ancestors and descendants

There are two independent ways to control how much of the tree is on screen, and they compose:

• Steps — how many relationship hops out from the focus to show, in any direction. Zero shows only the focus person.
• Generations — separate depth settings for ancestors and for descendants, so you can pull four generations up while holding descendants at one.

On top of those, individual branches expand and collapse. You can open one grandparent’s line without opening the other, expand all descendants of a person in one action, or collapse a branch you are done with. There is a master expand-all and collapse-all in the canvas controls for when you want the whole thing or none of it.

PDR tells you when someone is off screen rather than just not drawing them. A person whose stored parents outnumber the parents currently visible gets a chevron above their card; clicking it fetches the missing ancestors and pins them onto the canvas. And if you add or find a relative who falls outside your current Steps setting, PDR does not silently drop them — it pins them visible for the session and tells you, by name, what number to raise Steps to in order to see them properly along with anyone else at that distance. That is the difference between a filter and a disappearance.

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Step, half, adoptive, in-law — and the people who are not family

Real families are not a binary tree, and the relationship model does not pretend otherwise. PDR stores four kinds of link — parent, partner, sibling, and a general association — and then qualifies them:

• Biological, step, adopted, half, in-law are recorded on the relationship itself, so a step-parent and a birth parent are both parents and are distinguishable.
• Partners are asked whether they were married, so the tree uses the right word rather than calling everyone a spouse. A relationship can be marked as ended, and can carry start and end dates — which is how remarriage is represented: the earlier partnership stays on the tree, drawn as a dashed line, rather than being deleted to make room for the later one. The end date is deliberately not labeled as a divorce: it is the date the partnership stopped, whether that was a separation or a death, and PDR does not ask you which. If you are looking for a way to record that a person has died, that is not here — it is the death year on the person themselves, described under privacy below.
• Siblings are asked what kind when it is ambiguous — full, half, or neither — instead of PDR guessing.
• Cousins are computed, not typed. The label engine works out cousin degree and removal from the path through the tree, alongside half-, step- and in-law forms. You can have those labels gendered or neutral, and there is a switch to simplify the half-relation wording if you find the precise form fussy.

PDR also records people who are not relatives at all — friends, close friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates, teammates, housemates, mentors, managers, clients and former partners. They appear in your photographs as much as your family does, and a tree that could not hold them would be a worse picture of your library. Relatives off the direct bloodline surface through a count on the person’s card, so a branch you are not currently following advertises how much is behind it rather than vanishing.

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Changing how it looks

Per tree, you can change:

• The canvas background image and how strongly it shows through.
• Tree contrast, which drives the weight of the cards and lines against that background.
• Whether relationship labels are gendered.
• Whether half-relation labels use the simplified wording.
• Whether the gender marker appears on cards at all.
• Whether per-branch lanes and family dividers are drawn.
• How far the tree reaches, via Steps and Generations.

Per person, you can change the portrait, the card background, the notes shown on the card, and the recorded gender.

There is a display switch for the birth–death line on cards, which reads as “1948 – Living” while someone is alive, and a set of six pathway highlight effects for tracing the route from the focus to another person, with your choice of what triggers them.

Why this is only a partial yes. Everything above changes how the tree looks on screen. There is no page setup: no paper size, no margins, no orientation, no option to tile a large tree across several sheets, and no control over card size or typography. Programs built for printing wall charts do all of that, and on this row they are ahead of us. See export for what that means in practice.

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Working the way you work

Windows only. Photo Date Rescue 3.0.4 runs on Windows 10 and 11. There is no macOS build, no Linux build and no mobile companion, so if you are on a Mac this feature is not available to you at any price. Several products on the comparison run on both.

What is there:

• Zoom in, zoom out and fit as toolbar buttons, and also in the actions menu. The mouse wheel zooms, and dragging pans. Fit frames the whole tree, which is the natural reset after you have wandered.
• Ctrl+Z to undo and Ctrl+Y to redo. The history is persistent across sessions rather than cleared when you close the app, so you can walk changes back a long way. The buttons state how many changes are available.
• Esc closes the quick editors and Enter saves them, so renaming a person or setting their years is a keyboard round trip.
• Toolbar controls carry tooltips and accessible names.

What is missing, plainly. The diagram itself has no keyboard route through it. Cards are not tab stops, arrow keys do not move between relatives, and the drawing carries no roles or labels for assistive technology — a screen reader can reach the toolbar and the dialogs, but not the tree. We have not tested the feature with a screen reader or other assistive technology, so we make no claim about it beyond that. If you navigate by keyboard, this is the honest state of it in 3.0.4.

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Getting the tree out, and keeping living people private

There are two ways out, and both come from the same picture:

• PNG. The tree is saved as an image at twice screen resolution, on a white background, with the portraits included.
• PDF. PDR renders the same image into a print window and opens your print dialogue, where “Save as PDF” or “Microsoft Print to PDF” produces the file. It also prints to a real printer from there.

Two things to know before you rely on this. First, the export captures the canvas as it stands on screen, at its on-screen size. Anything scrolled out of view is not in the file. Use Fit to frame the whole tree before exporting, or you will get the part you were looking at. Second, the “PDF” is a picture inside a page, not vector text — the names will not be selectable or searchable in the resulting file, and it will not tile a large tree across multiple sheets. For a wall chart, a program with real page setup will do better.

Privacy

The strongest privacy property is structural: there is nowhere for the tree to go. No account, no cloud, no shared tree, no publishing step. The tree exists on your computer and it is shared when you export a file and send it, and not before. Nothing about your relatives is transmitted anywhere by using this feature.

Within a tree, you can also control what is drawn at all:

• Hide a person’s ancestry from a given tree. It is stored with the tree, so the branch stays hidden when you reopen it, and the underlying people are untouched.
• Hide faces, globally or per person, replacing portraits with initials. This carries into the export, because the export is a picture of what is on screen — which is the useful behavior when you want to send a relative the shape of the family without sending everyone’s photograph.
• Turn off the dates line so birth and death years are not on the cards.

Why this is only a partial yes. Every one of those controls is manual. PDR knows perfectly well who is living, and not by guessing from a blank field: there is a Still living tick on the person, and ticking it grays out the death-year box so the two cannot contradict each other. The card then reads “1948 — Living”, against “1948 — 2011” when both years are known, or “d. 2011” when only the death year is. So the information is there, stated deliberately by you — but there is no rule that acts on it. Nothing offers to suppress living people’s details when you export, and nothing warns you that you are about to write a file containing them. Genealogy programs have offered a “privatize living people” option on export for years, and we do not have one. If you are sending a tree outside the family, you have to remember to hide what you want hidden — and the risk if you forget is that a file leaves your hands carrying a living relative’s birth date and family connections.

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Letting your own photographs suggest who might be related

Yes. PDR notices which people keep appearing in photographs together and offers that as a starting point — in effect, “these two are in a great many of the same pictures” — which is very often exactly how a family shows up in a real collection. Suggestions are presented one at a time for you to accept or reject; nothing is ever applied on your behalf, and no relationship appears on the tree because PDR decided it should. Putting your photos on the people covers the narrower version of this that runs while you are adding a partner.

To do it

1. Let PDR finish finding and grouping faces in your library. Suggestions are drawn from what it has already seen, so a half-scanned library suggests little.
2. Open the suggestions and read them one at a time. Each names the two people and rests on how often they appear together.
3. Accept one to create the link, and choose what kind of relationship it is. Reject one to keep it off the tree.
4. Exclude a pairing outright if you never want to be asked about it again.

Limitations

• The signal is appearing together in photographs, and nothing else. Nothing is inferred from dates, from places, or from anything you have typed. Two people photographed together often are offered; two people you have described in detail are not.
• A pairing needs a substantial number of shared photographs. A genuine relationship that is thinly photographed — a grandparent who died early, a relative who lived abroad — will simply never be suggested. Absence of a suggestion is not evidence of anything.
• Co-appearance says two people are close, not how they are related. A couple, two siblings and a pair of lifelong friends look identical from the photographs alone, so the kind of relationship is always your call.
• Dismissing a suggestion is not the same as excluding it. If you neither link nor exclude the pair, it can come back.

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Holding the people who mattered but were not relatives

Yes. The tree is not restricted to blood and marriage, because a photo collection never was. Someone can be recorded as a friend, a close friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a classmate, a teammate, a mentor or simply an acquaintance, and a relationship can be marked as having ended, so a former colleague or a neighbor from the house before last stays in the story truthfully rather than being deleted or quietly promoted to family. Step, half, adoptive, in-law — and the people who are not family sets out how these sit alongside the family relationship kinds.

To do it

1. Add the person, then connect them to whoever they belong with on the tree.
2. Choose the kind of connection — friend, neighbor, colleague, classmate, mentor and the rest are all offered.
3. If the connection is in the past, mark it as ended so the tree reflects that without losing the person.

Limitations

• The generation filters do not travel through them. These connections sit outside the family structure, so the controls that walk a set number of generations up or down will not reach anybody through a friend. A non-relative appears when they are linked to someone already on screen, not by being reached through the family.
• They are drawn like anybody else. Only the label distinguishes a neighbor from a nephew, and an exported picture of the tree gives you no way to hide non-relatives or to style them differently.
• People are added one at a time. There is no way to record a group — a class, a team, a street — as a group, so eleven teammates are eleven separate people and eleven separate connections.

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Building it without putting living relatives onto a service

Yes. A family tree in PDR is built entirely on your own machine. There is no account, no upload and no connection to any genealogy service, so the names, the relationships, the birth years and the photographs of living relatives are not handed to anybody, are not searchable by anybody, and are not subject to somebody else’s change of terms. This is not a privacy setting you switch on; there is nowhere for the tree to go. Getting the tree out covers the one privacy gap that remains, which is that suppressing living people’s details in a file you send is manual work.

To do it

1. Build the tree normally. Nothing asks you to sign in, at any point.
2. Disconnect from the internet if you want to satisfy yourself. The tree works unchanged.
3. To give a relative a copy, export a picture of the tree and send them that file.

Limitations

• The other side of that is no sharing and no collaboration. A relative cannot contribute to your tree, cannot be invited to it, and cannot correct a date you got wrong. What you can send them is a picture.
• Nothing can be brought in from a genealogy service. A tree already built elsewhere has to be entered by hand — see known gaps, where this is the single biggest limitation on the page.
• There is no syncing between your own computers. The tree lives with your library rather than in an account, so it reaches a second machine only by the library reaching it too. See surviving a change of drive or computer.

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Stepping back through an edit, and through a change of viewpoint

Yes, and it is a deliberate decision rather than an accident. Changing who the tree is centered on is not the same kind of act as changing the family, and PDR keeps the two apart. Stepping back from a change of viewpoint returns you to where you were looking without quietly undoing a relationship you added a moment earlier, and stepping back from an edit does not fling you to some other part of the tree you had wandered through. Relationship changes are remembered permanently, so you can walk edits back a long way; where you were looking is remembered for the session. Moving the tree onto a different relative covers changing the viewpoint itself.

To do it

1. Work normally — move the focus around, and make relationship changes as you go.
2. Press Ctrl+Z to step back. The tooltip tells you whether the next step back is a change of view or a change of data.
3. Press Ctrl+Y to step forward again, provided you have not made a new change in between.

Limitations

• Your trail of where you had been lasts only for the session. Closing the tree loses it, while your edits remain. Reopening puts you back at the saved focus rather than at the end of a path you had walked.
• You are told which kind of step is next, but not which change. The tooltip distinguishes a view step from a data step; it does not name the person or the relationship involved, so the detail you find out by doing it.
• Stepping back and then making a new change discards what you had undone. The steps forward are gone for good at that point, which is the normal behavior but is worth knowing before you experiment.

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Saving several different views of one tree

Yes. A view can be saved with its own center person, its own depth settings for how many generations and how many steps outward to show, its own background and contrast, and its own choices about which people are hidden and how the relationship labels are worded. Switching between saved views reloads all of it at once, so a single collection of people can be presented several different ways — one for your mother’s side, one stripped back to the direct line for printing, one with faces hidden for sending outside the family. Changing how it looks lists what each view can carry.

To do it

1. Set the tree up the way you want it — focus, Steps, Generations, background, contrast, what is hidden.
2. Save it as a view and give it a name that says what it is for.
3. Change everything freely and save a second view. The people and relationships are shared between them; only the framing differs.
4. Switch between views to move between framings without setting anything up again.

Limitations

• There is a limit of five saved views. Adding a sixth means deleting one first.
• A view stores the settings, not a snapshot of the family. Reopening one shows the family as it is now, so a relationship you have deleted since saving the view is gone from the view too. It is a way of looking, not an archive.
• What you had selected or highlighted on screen is not saved. A view restores the framing, not the state you had worked the tree into within it.

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Known gaps in 3.0.4

Everything on this list is a real limitation of the shipping build, not a simplification for this page.

• No GEDCOM import or export. The universal genealogy interchange format is not supported in either direction. You cannot bring an existing tree in from another program, and you cannot take this one out to one. For anyone with an established tree elsewhere, this is the single biggest limitation on the page.
• No page setup for printing. No paper size, margins, orientation or tiling across sheets.
• Export captures the visible canvas, not automatically the whole tree. Fit first.
• The PDF route is a raster image in a print window. Text in it is not selectable or searchable.
• No automatic privacy rule for living people on export.
• No keyboard navigation of the diagram, and no assistive-technology roles on the drawing.
• Not tested with assistive technology.
• Windows only. No macOS, Linux or mobile version.
• No research features. No record hints, no matching against online databases, no source citations attached to facts. PDR draws the tree you know; it does not help you discover one you do not.

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How to check any of this yourself

You do not have to take this page’s word for it. The trial is free and none of the behavior above is restricted inside it.

• Portraits from your library: open the family tree with a library PDR has already scanned for faces, and see whether people arrive with their faces on.
• Changing focus: double-click a card and watch whether the relationship labels around it recalculate, and whether anything has to reload.
• The Steps message: set Steps low, then add a relative who falls outside it, and check that PDR names them and tells you the number to raise it to.
• Line meanings: record one full sibling and one half sibling and compare the two lines.
• The export limitation: zoom in on one corner of a tree, export a PNG, and open it. Then press Fit and export again. Compare the two files — that is the behavior described above.
• The privacy gap: export a tree containing someone with no death date and confirm for yourself that nothing offered to suppress their details.

If you find any statement on this page to be wrong in the current build, tell us on the support page and we will correct it here. This page is cited as evidence on our comparison table, and a comparison resting on a stale claim is worth nothing.