Organize a photo library

Applies to: Photo Date Rescue for Windows, version 3.0.11. Last verified: 17 September 2026. Every statement on this page was checked against the shipping 3.0.11 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.

One distinction runs through every answer below, and it is worth naming before you start:

• The files — your photos and videos, copied out as ordinary dated folders with corrected dates written inside them.
• The organizing — albums, named people, face clusters, subject tags and captions. This lives in PDR’s own database.

The files are portable. The organizing is not. That single fact decides three of the seven answers on this page, and we would rather you knew it before you spend a weekend here than after.

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At a glance

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Taking in a large, mixed pile

Yes, with two limits. PDR reads 36 photo types — 19 raw formats among them, plus HEIC and AVIF — and 22 video types, in a single pass (the full list). It indexes what it finds into a local database and works through the files in batches on background threads, so tens of thousands of mixed files in one run is a normal thing to ask of it rather than an edge case. Throughout, the source files are only ever read.

Limitations

• Files over 500 MB are not content-hashed. Above that size PDR falls back to matching on filename and size, which is a weaker test. This matters most for long videos and large raw files, and it is the reason the duplicates answer below is narrower than it looks.
• The free trial stops at 1,000 files. That is a lifetime count on the device, not a per-run limit, so a trial spent on a test folder is a trial partly used up.

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Giving the library a structure

Yes, but one whole layer is missing. You get real albums, album folders that nest one level deep, and an output tree organized by year, by year and month, or by year, month and day — you choose which when you set up the run.

One level means exactly one. You can put a folder inside a folder, with albums as the leaves, and no further — PDR’s own message when you try reads “Folders can only nest one level deep.”

What is missing

There are no star ratings and no color labels anywhere in PDR. Not in the database schema, not in the interface, not in the shipping build. We checked rather than assumed, because this is the single most common way photographers cull a shoot. If you sort by picks and rejects today, that habit does not survive the move to PDR, and no workaround in the product reproduces it.

There are also no keywords or labels you can apply yourself. The subject tags PDR shows come from its own fixed vocabulary and are read-only — there is no way to add a word of your own to a photo, or to change the ones PDR assigned.

Limitations

• Album folder nesting stops at one level: a folder inside a folder, with albums as the leaves.
• The dated output tree is chosen per run. Changing your mind means running again to a new destination rather than restructuring what is already written.

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Reading and writing metadata

Reads plenty. Writes very little. PDR reads camera make and model, lens, ISO, aperture, focal length, GPS coordinates and orientation, and it uses all of it. What it writes back into the photo is a much shorter list: the corrected date, GPS, and a description.

Three gaps that decide this answer

• It never writes keywords, ratings, IPTC rights or person tags. The people you have named and the subjects PDR has tagged stay in PDR’s database.
• It never writes anything at all to a video file. Video dates are corrected in the filename and in PDR’s own records, not inside the file.
• So most of what you organize by does not travel in the file. Open a PDR-corrected photo in another program and you will find the date and the location. You will not find the person’s name.

If you need keywords, ratings, rights fields or person tags to travel with the file itself, PDR will not put them there — you need a program that writes a full IPTC set out to XMP.

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Finding a photo again

Four of the five ways people remember a photo are covered. You can find a photo by when it was taken, by the camera that took it, by the city or country it was taken in, and by the name of a person in it once you have named them through face recognition. There are also 193 built-in subject labels — beach, cake, dog — and full-text search across filenames.

What is missing

• There is no map view. PDR knows where a photo was taken and will find it by place name, but it will not show you a map and let you draw a box around last summer.
• There is no open-ended search. You cannot describe what you are looking for in your own words and have PDR interpret it.
• Your own captions and video transcripts are not searchable. PDR stores both, but neither is reachable from the free-text search box.

Before you rely on it

Subject tagging is off by default, and switching it on downloads a model the first time. Until you do that, subject search returns nothing — not because the feature failed but because it was never enabled.

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Finding duplicates

Byte-identical copies only. PDR hashes file contents with SHA-256, so a file that has been copied and renamed five times is still recognized as the same file. It does not matter what it is called or which folder it sits in.

What that does not cover

There is no perceptual or visual matching. An edited version of a photo, a resized copy for email, and three near-identical frames from a burst are treated as three unrelated photographs, because as files that is exactly what they are. If your duplicate problem is “I have the same picture eleven times at different sizes”, PDR will not solve it.

Limitations

• Files over 500 MB fall back to a filename-and-size match instead of a hash.
• Inside a ZIP, a file under 5 MB whose hash fails to compute gets no duplicate check at all. Scanning a folder or a drive, PDR always falls back to matching on filename and size instead, whatever the size of the file. Corrected 30 July 2026: we published this as a general limit; it applies only to files read from inside an archive.

Excire and Lightroom do more than PDR does on this row of the comparison. That is a fair reading of both products.

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Making bulk changes safe to undo

Only partly — some bulk changes come back cleanly and some do not.

What works in your favour

• A bulk date change can be undone. Set a date on a selection in Memories and an Undo button stays on screen until you use it or dismiss it — it is not a toast that vanishes while you are still deciding. Using it puts every file in that batch back to the date, the source and the confidence it had before, in one go.
• PDR copies its own database every time it starts, and again before anything that reshuffles people or faces. Settings → Data lists those copies and restores any of them in one click. Restoring is all-or-nothing — everything you changed after that point goes with it — and your photo files are never touched.
• Deleting inside PDR is a soft delete to an in-app Recycle Bin, which leaves the file on disk.
• Album and folder organizing has a ten-step undo within a session, with redo as well.
• Every Fix run exports a report, as CSV or plain text, of everything it changed.

Against that

• A Fix run itself has no revert. If you apply a date correction to 4,000 photos and change your mind about the run as a whole, the route back is to delete the output folder and run again with different settings — which is safe only because your sources were never written to.
• Removing photos from an album is not on the undo stack. The ten steps cover moving albums between folders, not taking pictures out of an album.
• At least two paths remove files from disk without going through the bin. The soft-delete promise is not universal. One of them runs automatically when PDR starts, tidying up files it has already verified as duplicates within your library, and it does not ask first.

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Taking the work with you

The files, yes. The organizing, no. This is the most important answer on the page and the one we are most tempted to soften, so it is stated first and plainly.

Your photographs are genuinely not trapped. They come out of PDR as ordinary photo and video files in plain dated folders, with corrected dates and GPS written inside them, readable by any program on any operating system. Nothing about that output needs PDR to open it, and nothing about it needs PDR to keep existing.

What does not come with you

Albums, album folders, named people, face clusters, subject tags and captions live only in PDR’s local database. The only way to extract them is DB Backup, a section of the Library Drive Manager whose “Save a copy of my library DB” button produces a raw database file that no other photo program opens. There is no XMP sidecar export and no keyword write.

Put concretely: spend a weekend organizing 40,000 photos in PDR and that weekend does not leave with you. The photographs do.

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What your library looks like if you stop using PDR

Yes, your photos stay organized without us. The library PDR builds is ordinary folders of ordinary files on a drive you own, named and filed by date. The corrected date is written into each photo’s own embedded information, so Windows itself, or any other photo program you move to, reads the right date rather than the day the file happened to be copied. Nothing needs PDR installed to open, browse, back up or move it. There is no proprietary container, no catalog you must keep, and no lock-in. If PDR vanished tomorrow, the dated folders would still make sense to you in twenty years’ time.

To do it

1. Run the Fix as normal. The dated folders at your destination are the thing you keep.
2. Open one of those folders in Windows on its own, with PDR closed, and check the dates read correctly. That is what any other program will see.
3. Copy or back up those folders wherever you like. They carry their own meaning with them.

Limitations

• What does not survive is the work held in PDR’s own records rather than in the files. Albums, the people you have named, subject tags and family trees are readable by PDR and by nothing else. If you plan to leave, the folder structure and the dates are what you take with you, and that weekend of naming faces is not.
• Video files carry nothing internally. A video’s corrected date is in its filename and its folder, not inside the file, so a program that reads only embedded information will not see it.
• The fuller account of exactly what does and does not travel is in taking the work with you, which is the same answer stated at length.

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Keeping track of which drive the library is on

There is one screen that decides this, and everything else follows it. The Library Drive Manager is where PDR records which drive your library lives on. Whatever is set there is what every other operation acts on, so if a Fix is writing somewhere you did not expect, this is the screen to look at first. It lists the drives PDR has used, shows whether each one is currently connected, and shows how many photos it has counted in each folder.

It is also how you get back to a library after a gap. If you have used PDR before on a drive that is now reconnected — or you are on a rebuilt machine — the Manager can look for previous PDR libraries and offer them to you as Discovered libraries, which you then add or ignore one at a time. Your decisions are remembered, so a drive you ignored does not keep asking.

From 3.0.9 each row also carries a capacity bar along the bottom of it, read left to right the way File Explorer’s is. The used part is split into what PDR’s library is taking and what everything else on the drive is taking, because clearing out other programs’ files is often the cheapest way to make room — never delete your Library Drive folders to do it. The scale above the bar is headed Remaining and counts down: 75%, 50%, 25%, 15%, 10%. The bar changes color with it, amber at a quarter left, red at 15% and purple at 10%, and PDR keeps the last 5% of every Library Drive free, marked off as a solid block at the right-hand end. That reserve is the point at which PDR stops saving to the drive; see being refused a Fix because the drive is nearly full. You do not have to open the Manager to be told — once a connected Library Drive passes a quarter free, a banner appears on the Dashboard naming it, and dismissing that banner buys you the rest of that level rather than a number of days, with the button saying which level it will come back at.

To do it

1. Open the Workspace and go to the Library Drive Manager.
2. Read the list. Each row is a drive PDR knows about, with its connection state and its photo counts.
3. To switch, pick the saved Library Drive you want to work in.
4. To find an older library, run the scan and then add or ignore each discovered candidate.
5. Use the per-row refresh if a drive has been plugged in since the list was drawn.
6. To take a drive off the list, click the padlock at the top of the Manager open first — Remove from Drives is greyed out until you do. Read the warning: it names how many photos are about to leave your index.
7. To move a library to another drive, choose Copy and switch to another Library Drive… on its row rather than removing it. PDR copies everything across, switches you over, and takes the old row off the list once the copy has landed.

Limitations

• It is only on the Workspace. The Library Drive Manager does not appear on the Welcome screen. If you cannot find it, you are on the wrong screen rather than missing a setting.
• Removing a drive from the list takes its photos off your index. Until 3.0.8 this page said removal only dropped a bookmark, which was true then and is no longer the whole story. From 3.0.9 a drive on the list is a drive on the index, so removing the row removes its photographs from PDR’s index with it: you will not find them in Search or Memories any more and your totals drop by that many. Nothing on the drive itself is touched — the folder, the photographs and every file in it stay exactly where they are, and what goes is PDR’s record of having read them. PDR warns you first and names the number, and if another of your Library Drives has room it offers to copy them there instead. List the folder again under Advanced and its photos come back, with the faces and names PDR had already worked out.
• The scan only finds libraries on drives that are connected now. A drive in a cupboard cannot be discovered. Plug it in first, then scan.
• Counts are a snapshot. They are what PDR last counted, not a live figure, so refresh a row before trusting its number after you have changed files outside PDR.

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Moving the library to another computer

Yes. PDR keeps a copy of the library’s records on the library drive itself, not only on the PC that built it. Plug that drive into another computer and open the library there and the organizing comes back with it — the albums, the people you named, the tags — and not merely the files. That is the difference between moving house and starting again. What it does not mean is that the organizing works outside PDR: for that, see what your library looks like if you stop using PDR.

To do it

1. Install PDR on the second computer.
2. Connect the library drive. PDR recognizes that it came from another computer and asks what to do with it: add it to the profile you are in, or put it in a new profile named after the one on the drive. Your photos are not moved or changed either way.
3. Choose Connect to a library you already have. That is the route for moving to a second or replacement computer. Do not choose Set as new library: that one is for a drive that does not hold a library yet, and it would replace the library on the drive with this computer’s.
4. Let it read the library in. When that finishes, the albums, names and tags are there as you left them.

Limitations

• The new machine has to read the library in first. Nothing is available until that pass finishes, and on a large collection it takes time. This is a wait, not a risk, but it is not instant.
• Thumbnails are rebuilt locally rather than carried across. The second computer regenerates its own, which is the slowest part of settling in.
• Any feature that needs a downloaded model will download it again. The models are local to each machine, so a computer that has never used subject tagging will fetch what it needs the first time you ask for it.
• Only one computer at a time writes to the library. The drive records which computer that is. If the first computer still holds it, the second one connects and opens the library read-only, names the computer that has it, and offers Take over writing. Everything is there to look at; changing it is the one thing that waits on your say-so. That is deliberate: two computers writing to one library at once is how a library gets corrupted, and taking it over silently is how you would find out too late.
• A drive another computer is using cannot be set up as a new Library Drive here. PDR stops and tells you which computer has it, rather than replacing that library with this computer’s.

Updated 17 September 2026. The steps and limitations above describe version 3.0.9. Earlier versions of this page said only “open the library from it” and did not name the two buttons, the writer lock or the read-only state you land in when another computer still holds the library.

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One photo in several albums without a second copy

Yes. Albums in PDR are memberships rather than folders. A single photograph can belong to as many albums as you like — the wedding, the year, the one about your father — and there is still exactly one file on the disk. Removing it from one album leaves it in the others and leaves the file itself untouched. You are never choosing which album a photo “really” belongs in, and you are never paying for a second copy in disk space.

To do it

1. Select a photo, or several at once.
2. Add them to an album. Repeat for as many albums as you want them in; nothing objects to a photo already being somewhere else.
3. Remove from one album whenever you like. The other albums and the file on disk are not affected.

Limitations

• Because albums are memberships, they exist in PDR’s records rather than on the disk. The folders on your drive stay organized by date, so another program browsing that drive sees years and months, not your albums. See what your library looks like if you stop using PDR.
• Album folders nest one level deep, as covered in giving the library a structure. That is a limit on how you file albums, not on how many albums a photo can be in.

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A browsable timeline built without you arranging anything

Yes — and it is a complete archive, not a highlights reel. Every photo PDR dates takes its place in a timeline automatically, as a consequence of having a date at all. You drill from years into months into days, and every photograph from that day is there. There is no tagging to do, no arranging, no curating and no setup: the timeline is simply what your library looks like once the dates are right. That is the point of getting the dates right in the first place.

To do it

1. Open Memories after a Fix run has finished.
2. Choose a year, then a month, then a day.
3. Every photo dated to that day is shown. Nothing has been hidden or ranked on your behalf.

Limitations

• Nothing picks your best shots. There is no algorithm choosing favorites, no scoring and no editing down. Forty frames of the same cake appear as forty frames of the same cake.
• There is no “one year ago today”. PDR does not surface anniversaries, resurface old photos or notify you about anything. You go and look; it does not come and find you.
• There is no grouping into events or trips. A fortnight in Italy appears as fourteen separate days, not as one holiday. If you want it held together as a trip, that is an album you make yourself — see one photo in several albums.
• A photo PDR could not date confidently is not placed in the timeline until you settle its date. See finishing those by hand.

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Showing each photo’s date on the picture itself

Yes, as a switch on the grid rather than a change to the files. In Memories, Needs dates or Search & Discovery, open the Display button and tick Date stamp under the Show on the photo heading. Every tile then carries its own date in the bottom right corner, in amber on a dark halo, which is roughly what a film camera with a databack used to print. Under the tick box is a picker for how the date is written, with a search box you can type your country into.

This is a way of reading the grid, not a way of changing photos. Scanning a screen of ninety thumbnails to see whether the dates came out right is the thing it is for, and it is considerably faster than opening them one at a time. Switch it off and the grid is exactly as it was.

Where the date comes from

It is the date PDR holds for the file — the one in the name PDR gave it, falling back to the indexed date for a file PDR has catalogued but not yet renamed. It is not read back off a date the camera once printed into the picture. PDR can read a printed date, but that is a separate action you run and confirm — see reading a date a camera printed onto the photo — and it never happens as a side effect of switching this stamp on. A photo PDR has no date for shows no stamp at all, rather than a dash or an “unknown”. A placeholder would be PDR asserting something about the file that it does not know.

Limitations

• On the grid it is fixed. Bottom right, amber, monospace, one size. There is nothing to position, recolor or resize, because a grid tile is a way of looking at a library rather than a picture you are designing. The full set of controls — corner, drag, font, size, transparency, effect and color — is in the collage editor. See printing the date onto the photo in a collage.
• It does not travel. The stamp is drawn over the tile on your screen and goes no further: not into the file, not into an export, not into anything you share from the grid. The original photo on disk is untouched, and switching the option off leaves nothing behind. In a collage it is different — there the date is part of the design, so it is in the picture you export, though still never in the original file.
• One date format for the whole app. How the date is written is a single setting, so a photograph reads the same in every grid and in a collage. You cannot have Memories in one format and Search & Discovery in another.

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Reading a date a camera printed onto the photo

PDR can read the orange digits an old camera burned into the corner of a print, and use that as the photo’s date. Right-click a photo in Memories, Needs dates, Albums or Search & Discovery and choose Read printed dates — or select a batch and use the Actions button. This is the opposite direction from the stamp described above: that one draws a date onto a picture, this one reads a date that is already there.

It is often the only true record of when a picture was taken. A scanned or re-photographed print has a file date that reflects the day it was scanned, not the day of the picture, and every copy and re-save since has layered more wrong dates on top. The digits in the corner were printed by the camera at the time and have not moved since.

Nothing is changed until you have seen it

This is the one thing in PDR that replaces a date you already hold, on the strength of a machine reading a few digits, so it reads everything first and writes nothing. When the run finishes you get a list: the actual crop the digits came out of, the photograph itself, and the date PDR would put in place of the one on record. Hovering the photograph opens it large, because a thumbnail proves a photograph is there but tells you nothing about whether the date is credible for it.

Every row has a tick box and you decide row by row. A date you typed in yourself starts unticked — your own work is the one thing here that must not be quietly replaced by a machine reading — and the row still shows you the reading in case you want it after all. Once the first few rows have proved it to you, one button ticks the whole list, so a run of three hundred photos is one click rather than three hundred.

Where the digits could be read two ways

03/04 is the 3rd of April or the 4th of March depending on who owned the camera, and no amount of looking at the picture settles it. The row offers both dates as buttons, with the likelier one already chosen following your Windows date order. A run of bare digits with nothing about it that says “date” is offered as a maybe rather than taken as fact, because numbers turn up on prints for other reasons — a frame number, a lab code down the edge.

Limitations

• It is in the download, and it stays on your computer. The recognizer ships inside PDR, which is why this version is about 15 MB larger than 3.0.9. Nothing is fetched, nothing is sent anywhere, and it works with no internet connection at all.
• Photos only. Videos are left out, because there is nothing printed on one. Photos with no printed date are skipped and never appear in the list.
• It takes about 0.6 seconds a photo, on half your processor cores so the machine stays usable while it runs.
• The date goes onto PDR’s record, not yet into the file. Run a Fix afterward to write the accepted dates into the photo files themselves.

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Albums you built in Google Photos

Yes, as albums inside PDR. A Google Takeout export represents each of your albums as a folder with a small record naming it. PDR reads those records and rebuilds them as real albums in your library, with the right photographs in them and under the names you gave them. It also recovers the titles and captions Google held against individual photos, which are otherwise the first thing an export loses. Be precise about the form they survive in, though, because it is not the form most people picture.

To do it

1. Add your Google Takeout export as a source, including every numbered part — see exports split across several archives.
2. Run the Fix. Albums are rebuilt as part of the run, not as a separate step.
3. Open your albums afterwards and check the names and contents against what you had in Google Photos.

Limitations

• They survive as albums inside PDR, not as folders on disk. The drive stays organized by date. See one photo in several albums for why that is the trade, and what your library looks like if you stop using PDR for what it costs you.
• Albums that Google exported empty do not appear. If the export contains the album’s name but none of its photographs, there is nothing for PDR to rebuild.
• The order photos had within a Google album is not preserved. If you had arranged an album by hand, that arrangement is lost; the photographs are all there.
• Albums shared with you by other people are treated exactly like your own, with no distinction drawn between the two.
• Albums are not recovered retrospectively. If you processed a Takeout with a version of PDR from before album import existed, those albums are not in your library now, and the only route to them is to scan the original export again.

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Known gaps in 3.0.11

Collected in one place, so you do not have to read the whole page to find them:

• No star ratings and no color labels, anywhere in the product.
• No map view, despite GPS being read and stored.
• No open-ended, describe-it-yourself search.
• Captions and video transcripts are stored but not searchable.
• No perceptual duplicate matching — byte-identical files only.
• No duplicate check at all for files under 5 MB whose hash fails, when they are read from inside a ZIP.
• No content hashing for files over 500 MB.
• No revert for a Fix run as a whole — a bulk date change in Memories does have an Undo, but the run that wrote the files does not.
• The per-file change log is recorded but cannot be read in the interface. The Library Drive Manager shows only a summary of the last pass.
• At least two code paths delete from disk without using the in-app bin.
• Keywords, ratings, IPTC rights and person tags are never written to files.
• Nothing at all is written into video files.
• No XMP sidecar export, so the organizing work cannot be handed to another program.

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How to check any of this yourself

• Stars and labels: look for a rating control on a selected photo, and in Settings. There is not one.
• What gets written to a file: run a Fix on a handful of photos, then open a corrected copy in any EXIF viewer. You will see the date, GPS and description. You will not see keywords or names.
• Video metadata: do the same with a video. The filename changes; the file’s internal metadata does not.
• Perceptual duplicates: save one photo twice at different sizes and run both through. PDR will treat them as two photographs, because they are two files.
• Bulk-date undo: set a date on a small selection in Memories and look for the Undo button that stays on screen afterwards. Use it, and check the dates went back. Until 30 July 2026 this line told you there was no undo to find; there is.
• Portability: create an album, then look for any export that carries it. DB Backup in the Library Drive Manager is the only route out, and it is a database file.

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If something on this page does not match what your copy of PDR does, that is a defect in one of the two and we want to know which. Tell us on the support page.

Related: the step-by-step guide to organizing a library walks through doing this rather than describing what is possible. Discover covers finding photos in more depth, and Plan covers what happens to your originals.