Licensing, trials and updates

Applies to: Photo Date Rescue for Windows, version 3.0.4. Last verified: 30 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.

A note on vocabulary before the detail, because two things are easy to confuse:

• Your license key — a line of characters emailed to you when you start a trial or buy a plan. It is the only credential in PDR. There is no account, no username and no password.
• Activation — entering that key on a particular PC, which ties the key to that machine and unlocks the app there.
• Which of the two starts a paid period — the purchase, not the activation. A monthly or yearly subscription runs from the day you pay for it, and that is the date the renewal is measured from. Activating later unlocks the app on that machine; it does not start, pause or extend the subscription. A lifetime license has no period to start, and the trial is counted in usage rather than days — see what the free trial allows.

A free trial has a license key too. Trials are not a mode you drop into without one; you get a key, you activate it, and the app then knows to apply the trial allowances.

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At a glance

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Activating your license key

One box, one key, no account. Open the license badge in the title bar, paste the key from your confirmation email, and activate. PDR checks the key with the payment provider that issued it, ties it to this machine, and stores the result so it does not have to ask again. Your plan — trial, monthly, yearly or lifetime — is read from the key. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into.

To do it

1. Click the license badge at the top of the window.
2. Paste your key. Spacing and capitals do not matter.
3. Activate. This step needs a working internet connection, and it is the only step that always does.
4. The badge changes to show your plan. Premium features unlock immediately on a paid plan; on a trial they stay locked and the allowances start counting.

What PDR sends, and what it keeps

It sends your license key and a one-way hash of a machine identifier, so the license can be tied to this computer. No email address, no filenames and nothing about your photos goes with it. What it keeps on your PC is your key, so it can re-check without asking you again, and a record of the result. PDR’s own license file stores a fingerprint of the key rather than the key. The full detail is on privacy and network activity.

Limitations

• First activation cannot be done offline. There is no offline activation code, no phone activation and no grace period before the first check. Until a key has been activated once on a machine, that machine cannot run PDR.
• An activation that fails tells you why, and the reasons are the provider’s. A key can come back inactive, expired or disabled, and PDR repeats that verdict rather than second-guessing it. If it is wrong, it is a purchase question rather than an app question.
• The stored license is tied to this machine. If the machine identifier PDR computes ever changes — a substantial hardware change can do it — the stored license stops matching and reads as invalid. Re-activating the key puts it right.
• The license panel is where the key lives, not the app menu. There is no separate account screen, because there is no account.

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Working offline, and the seven-day grace

Seven days between successful checks. After an activation, PDR re-checks your license quietly in the background each time it starts. If it cannot reach the service — no connection, a firewall, an outage — it falls back to the result it already has and carries on. You get a full seven days of that before the license is treated as expired and premium features lock. Your cached state is shown the instant PDR opens, so a slow check never holds the app up.

A lifetime license is the exception and never expires. It bypasses the grace calculation entirely, so a lifetime key keeps working offline indefinitely.

To do it

1. Activate once with a connection.
2. Disconnect if you like. PDR opens and runs normally.
3. If more than a day passes without a successful check, PDR shows a warning telling you how many days of grace are left. That is a prompt, not a lock.
4. Connect once and reopen PDR, or refresh from the license panel, and the seven days start again.

Limitations

• Seven days is a hard stop for monthly and yearly plans. Past it, premium features lock until the next successful check. Your library, your photos and everything you have already produced are untouched.
• Nothing re-checks on its own. Neither leaving PDR open nor restarting it contacts the service — a launch just re-reads the stored result and works out how old it is. The seven days therefore run from your last successful check, and the only ways to start them again are the Refresh button and re-activating. If you are about to go somewhere without a connection, refresh before you go rather than assuming a restart will do it.
• A free trial does not get the benefit of this. Grace covers the license check, not the trial allowance, and a trial Fix has its own connection requirement. See why a trial Fix needs a connection.
• The warning is a message, not a countdown you can inspect. There is no screen showing the exact time of the last successful check.

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Devices, and moving to a new PC

A monthly or yearly license covers up to three computers at once, a lifetime license up to five, and a free trial up to two. Each activation takes a slot. When the slots are full, the next activation is refused until you free one. Manage Devices, inside the license panel, is where you see the devices your key is currently activated on and remove one you no longer use.

To move to a replacement PC

1. Open the license panel on any machine you can still reach, and open Manage Devices.
2. Pick the device you are retiring and remove it. You will be asked to type your license key again to confirm — the same key gates every device-level change.
3. Install PDR on the new machine and activate the same key.
4. Connect your Library Drive. Your dates, people, albums and history come back with it, without re-importing. See restoring onto a replacement PC.

Limitations

• Manage Devices needs a connection. The list is not produced by this PC. It is fetched from our licensing service each time you open the panel, and what you see is what that service reports.
• Removing a device is a request to the service, not an action on that computer. It frees the slot. It does not reach out to the old machine, does not uninstall anything and does not delete any photos or libraries there.
• Confirming a device change puts your key on screen. You retype it in full. Worth remembering if somebody is watching or the screen is being shared.
• At once, not ever. Whatever your plan allows, the limit is concurrent activations rather than a lifetime total, so a machine you have finished with should be removed rather than left occupying a slot.

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Removing a license from this PC

Deactivating clears the license from this machine. It tells the service to release this device’s slot and removes the stored license locally. PDR then behaves as it did before activation: the app opens, the license badge asks for a key, and premium features are locked.

What deactivating does not touch

• Your photos, at the source or at any destination PDR has written to.
• Your library database, with its dates, people, albums, collages and trees.
• Your reports, your logs, any AI models you installed, and your settings.

Limitations

• The local license is cleared whether or not the service could be reached. That is deliberate — deactivating should never leave a machine stuck holding a license it cannot release. But it means a deactivation done offline can clear this PC without freeing the slot at the far end. Check Manage Devices from a connected machine afterwards.
• Trial usage is not returned. Deactivating a trial key, or reinstalling PDR, does not reset the allowances. See what the free trial allows.
• Deactivating is not canceling. It affects this computer, not your subscription. A subscription is managed with the store you bought it from — the link is in your purchase confirmation email — and a lifetime license has nothing to cancel.

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What the free trial allows

Every feature, with nine separate allowances. The trial is not a cut-down build and it is not time-limited. Nothing expires after a fortnight. What it has instead is a count against each of the things worth trying, and when a count is used up, that one thing stops while the rest carry on. Premium features — family trees, editing dates by hand, and photo format conversion — stay locked on a trial.

A paid plan — monthly, yearly or lifetime — removes all nine. There is no middle tier and no per-feature purchase.

To see where you stand

1. Click Trial Limits at the top left of the window.
2. Each allowance is listed as an amount used against its total, so you can see which one you are close to before you hit it.
3. When a limit is reached, the same panel opens with that row marked, rather than the app simply refusing.

Limitations

• The counts are of what you have used, not of what you still have. Deleting a collage does not give the collage back. This is deliberate: the totals read as a lifetime tally so they cannot be worked around by making something and removing it, and it means a trial spent on test material is a trial partly spent.
• Reinstalling does not reset the file allowance. The count of photos and videos fixed is held centrally against your key, so it survives a reinstall, a fresh Windows install and a new copy of the app.
• Eight of the nine are counted on the computer you are using. Only the file allowance is held centrally. The other eight live in the library database on that machine, which is worth knowing when you are reading the numbers rather than assuming they are a single account-wide total.
• Reports History and Memories keep working whatever the trial state. Hitting a limit stops the thing you were doing, not your access to what you have already produced.
• The allowances are enforced by the app on your PC. We have chosen gentle limits and a simple mechanism over a heavy one; that is a trade we are content to state rather than hide.

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Why a trial Fix needs a connection

No. A free trial cannot run a Fix offline, and we would rather say so than let you find out. Because the file allowance is counted on our side, PDR has to ask how much of it is left before a run can start. If it cannot ask — no connection, a firewall in the way, our service unreachable — the run is refused rather than allowed through uncounted. The same check gates the other capped actions, such as starting a screen recording.

A paid license has no allowance to count, so none of this applies. Once activated, a paid copy of PDR runs a Fix with no network at all.

Limitations

• Failing closed is the point, and it is still a limitation. An allowance you can bypass by unplugging the network is not an allowance. The cost is that a trial user on a train cannot work.
• A run that would take you past the limit is stopped before it starts, with a message saying the run would exceed your trial, rather than being allowed to run partway and stop in the middle.
• The count is sent after the run as well as read before it. If that message fails to get through, PDR does not penalize you for it and carries on.
• This is the one thing that keeps PDR from being fully offline for trial users. It is listed as such on running with no account and on the free-trial file counter.

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How updates arrive

PDR keeps itself current, and it does not ask you first. Ten seconds after the window appears, and then once every four hours while it stays open, PDR checks whether a newer version exists. If one does, it starts downloading straight away in the background. When the download finishes you are offered a restart. If you decline, the update is applied silently the next time you close the app. You can also check by hand from Menu › About PDR, which shows your version alongside the release history.

What you will see

1. Nothing at all, most of the time. The check and the download are quiet.
2. A notice when a download is under way, and another when it is ready, offering Restart now or leaving it for later.
3. For a release we mark as required, a restart prompt you cannot dismiss instead of the soft notice.
4. From About PDR, either your version confirmed as current or the newer version named.

Limitations

• There is no setting to turn any of this off. Not the check, not the four-hour interval, not the automatic download, and not the install-on-quit. If you need PDR to stay on a particular version, your firewall is the only lever.
• The download uses your connection without warning you first. You are told when it has finished, not when it has begun, which matters on a metered or slow line.
• You cannot cancel a download in progress. There is no stop control.
• There is no way to go back. PDR has no built-in rollback to a previous version; reverting means installing the older release yourself.
• A failed check is reported and then left. You get a message saying the check could not be made and suggesting you try later or visit the website; PDR does not retry immediately or explain why it failed.
• Updating does not touch your library. Your database, photos, settings and license carry over from earlier installs.

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Known gaps in 3.0.4

Collected in one place, because they are the things a reader weighing up a license most needs to know, and because the same ones appear against PDR on our comparison page:

1. First activation needs the internet. There is no offline activation route at all. See activating your license key.
2. A free trial cannot run a Fix offline. The run is refused rather than allowed. See why a trial Fix needs a connection.
3. Trial allowances never refund. Deleting what you made does not give the allowance back. See what the free trial allows.
4. Updates download and install without your say-so, and cannot be switched off. See how updates arrive.
5. Managing devices is not possible offline, so a machine that has died cannot have its slot freed from that machine. Use another one. See devices, and moving to a new PC.

When any of these changes, this page and the comparison table change together, and the “last verified” date at the top of this page moves with them.

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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/licensing-trial#summary — and we will either correct the software or correct the page.