Profiles

More than one separate library inside one PDR, on one license.

Checked against Photo Date Rescue 3.0.11 on Windows. Everything below describes the shipping build, including the parts we are not happy with.

A profile is a complete, separate library inside one PDR. Its own photos, its own dates, its own faces and names, its own trees and albums, and its own Library Drives — with nothing in one profile visible from another.

Until version 3.0.9 a PDR installation held exactly one library. If you needed a second separate set of photos — a partner’s, a business’s, or one you can show people without your own family being in it — the only way was to set up a whole second Windows account. Most people need one profile and will never notice the feature exists. This page is for the people who need two.

At a glance

Question	Answer
Does a profile keep photos private?	No. There is no PIN or password. Separate is not protected.
What happened to my library?	It became your first profile, in place. Nothing moved.
How many can I have?	Three. Each one costs real disk space, so the limit is real.
Does a second one cost more?	No. One license covers them all, and the AI models are shared.
Its drive isn’t plugged in. Now what?	PDR checks before it restarts, and gives you a way out either side of it.
If I delete one, do I lose photos?	No. Your photos stay exactly where they are, on every drive.

What a profile is, and whether you need one

You need a second profile if you have a separate set of photos to keep apart — your business photos from your family ones, say, or a partner’s library from yours. Anything else, and one profile is the right answer.

Everything PDR knows about your photos belongs to a profile: the dates it rescued, the faces it grouped, the names you typed, the family trees you built, the albums you made, and the list of drives it watches. A second profile starts all of that again from nothing. It is not a folder, a tag or a view — it is a second library.

The three reasons people actually give us:

Two people, one computer. A partner’s photos are their own library rather than a section of yours, so their faces and names never mix into your people list.
A business and a home. Client work stays out of the library you browse on a Sunday, and neither one grows a search index full of the other.
A library you can show people. One you can open in front of an audience without your family being in it.

If none of those is you, carry on as you were. Your single profile behaves exactly as PDR always has, and nothing about this feature asks anything of you.

You find your profiles across the top of the Library Drive Manager, which the button in the title bar opens. That button used to read “Library” on every installation — true, and it told you nothing. It now carries the name of the profile you have open.

A profile is not a password

This is the one thing on the page worth reading twice, because getting it wrong is the only way profiles can hurt you.

Profiles keep libraries separate, not protected. There is no PIN, no password and no lock. Anyone signed in to this Windows account can open PDR and switch to any profile on it, and see everything in it.

So a profile is the right tool for “I do not want my client work cluttering my family library”, and the wrong tool for “I do not want someone in this house seeing these photos”. For the second one, a separate Windows account is still the thing that does that, and a profile is not a substitute for one. We would rather say so here than let you find out later.

What a profile does do is keep the two libraries from leaking into each other. A drive holding one profile’s photos is never listed under another, never counted into another’s totals, and never searched from another. See what leaves your computer for the wider picture: none of this involves an account, a server or an upload.

What happened to the library you already had

The first time you open version 3.0.9, PDR takes the library you already have and calls it a profile, in place. No file is moved, copied, renamed or deleted. Your Library Drives are untouched. Every date, face, name, tree and album is exactly where it was.

It is named after your Windows account, or My Library if PDR cannot read that, and PDR asks once, on that one launch, whether you would like to call it something else — a box headed PDR Introduces Profiles. On a fresh install rather than an upgrade, the same box appears after you choose your first Library Drive, headed Confirm Profile Name instead.

It has to be answered. The box opens with the name PDR has already given the profile, so pressing OK accepts it and takes a second — but there is no Not now, the name cannot be left empty, and until an answer is recorded the box returns on the next startup. That is deliberate: this name is on a button at the top of every PDR window from now on, and a default nobody chose would sit there for good.

Corrected 17 September 2026. This section previously said the panel was headed Name your current profile, and that “Not now” was a real answer that did not come back. Neither is true of the shipping 3.0.11 build: the box has two headings depending on how you got here, and it has no dismiss.

How to add a profile

Open the button in the title bar carrying your profile name, and choose New profile at the end of the row of profiles. It asks two things:

A name. Whatever you will recognize it by.
Where that profile’s photos are. PDR sets the folder you pick up as the profile’s first Library Drive. Before the folder browser opens you get the same Library Drive planner that first-run setup uses — how big the collection is, whether more is coming — so that the drives it then offers are rated against what this profile actually needs. Skip goes straight to the browser if you already know which drive you want.

That second question is the difference between a profile you can use and one you cannot. A brand-new profile with no drive has nothing to show you, so switching into it would land you on the Welcome screen with everything locked. Answering it means the profile opens on its own library, like any other.

Changing your mind does not throw the profile away. Close the folder browser without choosing and the profile is still made, with the name you typed; it simply asks you for a drive the first time you open it, exactly as a fresh PDR install does.

You are never asked where a profile’s own working files go. That is PDR’s business rather than yours, and picking the wrong folder would be an expensive mistake to make on a first attempt.

One thing it will refuse: you cannot point a new profile at a folder that already holds a PDR library. A Library Drive belongs to one profile, so PDR says so and offers you another go rather than quietly taking a drive off the profile it belongs to.

How many profiles you can have, and why it is three

PDR keeps up to three profiles, and three is the limit for everyone. There is no way to end up with a fourth. You start with one: everything that was already in PDR became your first profile when you updated to 3.0.9, in place, with nothing moved.

The reason for three is disk space, and it is not a small amount. Every profile stores its own search index, its own thumbnails and its own face crops, and none of that is shared between them — so a second and a third profile cost real space on your disk rather than a little.

At three, New profile grays out and the reason is written underneath it rather than left for you to guess at. Deleting a profile you no longer use makes room for another straight away.

Each profile can also tell you what it is using: the three dots on a profile give you a figure for what PDR is storing on your PC for it — its settings, its search index, its thumbnails and its face crops. Not your photographs, which are on your Library Drives and are not PDR’s to count, and not the shared AI models. The count is worked out when you open the menu rather than when the window opens, because a real library takes a few seconds to add up, and PDR carries on working while it does.

Switching profile, and why PDR restarts

Click the profile you want in the row across the top of the Library Drive Manager. The one you are already using is marked and cannot be clicked, because switching to where you are does nothing.

A profile is a whole separate library, so PDR has to close the one it has open and open the other. It tells you it is going to restart before it does anything, and gives you Cancel. Any PDR windows you have open close with it, so finish what you are doing first.

It will decline outright while a Fix is running, while the AI is analyzing your photos, or while photos are being added to the search index. Changing profile mid-job would end that job halfway through with nothing written down about how far it got, so PDR names what is running and leaves you where you are. Let it finish, or stop it, and try again.

When the other profile’s Library Drive isn’t plugged in

A profile’s photos live on its own Library Drive, and an external drive can be sitting in a drawer when you go to switch. PDR checks before it restarts, so you find out while you can still do something about it rather than after the app has closed and reopened.

The message names the profile and says exactly where PDR was looking. That path matters: you are the only one who can tell an unplugged drive from one Windows has given a different letter since it was last used, and PDR cannot tell those apart. Plug the drive in, choose I’ve plugged it in — look again, and it checks again on the spot. Nothing has happened at that point — PDR has not restarted, and closing the box leaves you exactly where you were.

If it is a profile you have opened before, you can also switch without the drive and look at what PDR already holds on this PC. Be clear about what that is: thumbnails and the search index live here, but the photographs themselves are on the drive, and nothing can be added, moved or fixed until it is back. A profile you have only just made has nothing on this PC to look at at all, so PDR does not offer it that — it would land you on the Welcome screen with everything locked, which is the whole situation this check exists to prevent.

If the drive comes out during the restart, PDR tells you rather than leaving you on a setup screen with no explanation. The same message appears once the app is back, with the same choices and one more: a button that takes you straight back to the profile you came from, named, so you can see where it goes before you press it. Nothing reverts on its own, and nothing is lost either way — the profile is waiting exactly as you left it the moment the drive is back.

Deleting a profile, and what it never deletes

Your photos are never what gets deleted. Deleting a profile removes that profile’s settings, thumbnails, face crops and its record of where its photos are. The photos themselves stay exactly where they are, in the folders they are in, on every drive. PDR just stops keeping track of them, and the confirmation says this in as many words before you press anything.

Its Library Drives are left alone too, so you can add them to another profile afterward.

Two profiles cannot be deleted: the one you are using, and your last remaining one. The Delete item does not sit there grayed out with no explanation — it tells you which of the two it is, and what to do instead: switch to another profile first, or keep this one because PDR needs at least one.

There is a reason the delete is careful. On an upgraded PDR, your first profile lives in the same folder as PDR’s own settings, because that is where your library already was and nothing was moved to change it. A profile that deleted “its folder” would therefore delete your whole installation. So PDR does not work that way: each profile keeps a written list of the files and folders that are its own, and a delete removes exactly what is on that list and nothing else. It tells you what it is about to remove before you confirm, and if anything is still in use it says which, keeps the profile in your list, and lets you try again.

A Library Drive belongs to one profile

Everything below the row of profiles in the Library Drive Manager — the drives, their photo counts, DB Backup, Discovered libraries — belongs to the profile you have open, and only that one.

PDR writes the owning profile into the drive itself. That is what lets it give an honest answer when you plug a drive into another computer, or open it from a different profile, rather than a guess based on which library happened to look at it last.

A drive belonging to a profile you have deleted is not refused forever, either. It is offered back, so a profile you removed never strands a drive full of photos. See settings and where PDR keeps its data for what lives on a Library Drive and what lives on your PC.

What a second profile costs

Neither another license nor another download.

Your license covers every profile. It belongs to the computer rather than to a library, so a new profile never asks you to type your key again and never spends one of the devices your license allows. See licensing and the trial for how devices are counted.
The AI models are shared. The 577.73 MB PDR downloads for face and object recognition is downloaded once, not once per profile, along with the speech models — so a new profile can start analyzing straight away.

What a second profile does cost is disk space, which is the whole reason for the limit of three.

Where it falls short

There is no privacy in it. Named again here because it is the one thing people assume. No PIN, no password, no lock — see above.
Nothing moves between profiles. There is no way to send an album, a person or a tree from one profile to another. If photos are in the wrong profile, the fix is to point the right profile at the folder they are in.
Switching costs a restart. You cannot have two profiles open side by side, and you cannot search across them.
Three is a hard limit. Not a setting, not something support can raise. If you need a fourth, one of the three has to go.
Faces and names are learned per profile. Naming the same person in two profiles is two jobs, because neither library can see the other’s work.

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/profiles#limit — and we will either correct the software or correct the page.