Settings and where PDR keeps its data

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.

PDR keeps two quite different kinds of thing on your disk: your preferences, which are tiny, and its working data, which is not. This page tells you where both live, what is safe to delete when you are short of space, and what you lose if you delete it.

Throughout this page, %APPDATA% is the folder Windows opens when you type %APPDATA% into File Explorer’s address bar. Everything PDR keeps for itself is under one folder there.

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At a glance

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The Settings window

Settings opens from the App section at the bottom of the sidebar. It is a single window with a list of categories down the left, a search box at the top of that list, and the controls for the selected category on the right.

There is no Save button, and no OK button. Every change takes effect the moment you make it and is written to disk immediately. You close the window with the X. The version number of your copy of PDR is shown along the bottom of the same window.

Limitations

• There is no undo. Because changes save as you make them, the only way back is to change the control again yourself, or to reset everything.
• The search matches labels and related words, not the descriptions. Typing a word that appears only in a control’s explanatory text may not find it.
• Settings belong to one profile on one computer. They are not carried to another PC, they are not part of the library backup, and if you keep more than one profile each has its own set — changing a setting in one leaves the others exactly as they were.

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What PDR remembers

The categories in the Settings window are:

• General — sounds, the welcome screen, duplicate handling and whether corrected dates are written into photo files.
• Library — whether reports and the search index can be removed, and whether the CSV and TXT export buttons are shown.
• Workspace — the folder structure for fixed photos, whether sources are remembered between sessions, whether they are cleared after a Fix, and the output format.
• After Fix — whether fixed photos are made searchable automatically, and the master switch for the AI features.
• S&D — Search & Discovery and how the library refreshes itself.
• People — face detection, visual suggestions when naming, and whether People Manager opens at startup.
• AI — face detection, subject tagging, automatic processing and the confidence thresholds those use.
• Capture — the screenshot and screen-recording hotkeys, format, quality, audio and webcam options.
• Viewer & Collage — tooltips and hints, and whether an enhanced photo is saved as a new file or replaces the original.
• Privacy & Security — hiding captions and transcripts, for when you are sharing your screen.
• Backup — the library database backup and the sidecar copy kept on your library drive.

Two things are worth knowing about the defaults. The AI features are off until you turn them on. And duplicate skipping is switched back on every time PDR starts, deliberately, so a session where you turned it off does not quietly become permanent.

Limitations

• Not everything you can change is in this window. Your library drive, your sources and your per-camera adjustments are set where you use them, not in Settings — and profiles are named, switched and removed from the profile menu in the title bar, not from here.
• Some controls only appear when they apply. A category can look shorter than this list suggests depending on what you have enabled.
• Duplicate skipping does not stay off. If you deliberately want it off for a run, turn it off during that session; it will be on again next launch.

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Reset to Optimized Defaults

At the bottom right of the Settings window there is a Reset to Optimized Defaults link. It puts every control in that window back to the value PDR shipped with.

It is deliberately narrower than it sounds. It changes preferences only. It does not touch your library drive, your saved destinations, the answers you gave the Library Planner, your per-camera adjustments, or the advisories you have dismissed. Nothing in your library is deleted, no photo is affected, and your license is not affected.

Limitations

• It applies to the whole window, not one category. There is no way to reset just the Capture settings or just the AI settings.
• There is no undo. Once reset, your previous preferences are gone.
• It does not undo the effects of a setting. Resetting the output format does not convert photos you already fixed.
• Onboarding is reset separately. A different control clears the library drive and planner answers and restarts the setup flow. That one does change your library drive choice.

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Where PDR keeps its data

Everything PDR keeps for itself is under one folder:

%APPDATA%\Photo Date Rescue\

Some of what is in there belongs to the installation and is shared by everyone who uses PDR on this PC. The rest belongs to whichever profile is open. That distinction did not exist before 3.0.9 and it is worth knowing before you delete anything.

Shared by the whole installation

• license.json and a small hidden machine-identity file — your license. One license covers every profile; making a second profile does not use a second device slot.
• ai-models\ — the optional models you chose to install. Usually the largest folder here, and deliberately shared, so a second profile does not re-download hundreds of megabytes it already has. See the models section.
• whisper-cache\ — cached results of video transcription. Shared for the same reason.
• logs\ — PDR’s own log files, which support may ask for.
• profiles.json and profiles\ — the list of profiles, and the data belonging to the second and third of them.

Belonging to one profile

For your first profile these sit directly in the folder above. For a second or third they sit in profiles\, under a folder named for that profile. Either way they are that profile’s alone — a second profile starts with none of them.

• pdr-settings.json and settings.json — your preferences. Tiny.
• search-index\pdr-search.db — the library database. This is the one that matters: every date, caption, face, person, place and album you have built lives here.
• search-index\backups\ — the automatic snapshots of that database. Deleting these removes your ability to roll back.
• thumb-cache\ — thumbnails. Regenerated automatically.
• face-crops\ — the small cropped face images People Manager displays. Regenerated automatically.
• video-cache\ — playable versions of videos Windows cannot play directly. Regenerated on demand.
• fix-reports\ — the report from each Fix run.
• date-corrections.log.jsonl — a running record of the date changes that have been made.
• collage-projects\, collage-cutouts\ and collage-captures\ — your saved collage projects, the cut-out subjects you have made, and the images they use.
• Captures-temp\ and Captures-pending\ — screenshots and recordings not yet filed anywhere, and ones waiting for a library drive to come back.
• benchmarks\ — timings PDR records for its own speed estimates.
• library-state.json — which library drive this profile is currently using.
• review-usage.json — how much you have used PDR, and your answer if you have been asked for a review. A few hundred bytes. Deleting it forgets that you said no.
• A number of files and folders with names like Cache, GPUCache, Local Storage and Preferences — created by the browser engine PDR is built on, not by PDR. Nothing in them is yours, but they are not nothing: they are several hundred megabytes per profile, and they are counted in the size PDR reports for the profile.

Two more places sit outside that folder. Your fixed photos go to the destination folder you chose, not here. And the working folders PDR unpacks archives into are covered below.

Limitations

• The caches are safe to delete, the database is not. With PDR closed, deleting thumb-cache, face-crops, video-cache or whisper-cache costs you nothing but the time to rebuild them — though whisper-cache is shared, so that time is paid by every profile. Deleting search-index throws away every correction, name and caption you have made.
• PDR does not offer to do any of this for you. There is no “clear caches” button and no display of how much space each folder is using. The only figure PDR shows is in the profile menu in the title bar, as Using… under the profile’s name. It is a single total of everything in the “belonging to one profile” list above — not just the database and the caches, but the collage folders, the pending captures and the browser-engine folders too, which run to several hundred megabytes on their own. It is not a breakdown, it does not count the shared folders above, and it does not count your photographs.
• The figure is worked out once and then kept. PDR counts a profile the first time you open the menu after launch — you will see Working out what this is using… while it does, which on a large library is not quick. After that the same number is shown until you restart PDR, so deleting a cache will not be reflected in it straight away. If the count fails, PDR says so and does not try again.
• These folders can be big. On a library of tens of thousands of photos, the thumbnails and face crops alone run to gigabytes.
• Uninstalling PDR does not necessarily remove them. Check this folder yourself if you are removing PDR to reclaim space.
• Do not delete anything while PDR is running. The database in particular is open and in use.

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Temporary folders from unpacked archives

When you add a ZIP or RAR archive as a source, PDR unpacks it into a working folder called PDR_Temp. That folder sits inside your destination folder if you have chosen one, and in the Windows temp folder if you have not.

The unpacked copy survives you quitting PDR. That is on purpose: a large Google Takeout export can take an hour to unpack, and PDR does not want to make you do it again next time you open the app. It does mean that if you unpacked a 200 GB export yesterday, roughly 200 GB is still sitting on your disk today.

PDR clears an unpacked folder in two situations. When you remove that archive from your list of sources, its folder goes with it. And at launch PDR looks through PDR_Temp for folders that no longer belong to any source you still have and removes those. Unpacking is also capped: PDR stops unpacking rather than filling your disk beyond about 55 GB in one go.

Limitations

• There is no button to clear it. 3.0.11 has no “clean up unpacked files” control in Settings. If you want the space back now, remove the archive from your sources, or delete the PDR_Temp folder yourself with PDR closed.
• The launch-time cleanup is conservative on purpose. It only removes folders it is confident are orphaned. A folder belonging to a source you still have listed is kept, however long ago you finished with it.
• Locked files are left behind. If Windows Search, your antivirus or an open Explorer preview has hold of a file inside the folder, the cleanup skips it and the remains stay on disk. Restarting Windows and deleting the folder by hand clears it.
• The 55 GB cap is a stop, not a queue. Reaching it stops the unpacking rather than working through your archive in stages.
• Canceling an unpack leaves a partial folder. Cancel stops the work; what was already written is removed by the cleanup above rather than instantly.

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The optional models and the space they take

Some of PDR’s tools need model files too large to ship inside the installer, so they are downloaded only when you ask for the tool that needs one. Settings → AI does not download anything. What it holds is a section called Downloaded AI components: a list of what is already on this computer, what each one is for, what it is costing you in disk space, and a way to remove it. The download itself always happens at the point of use, where PDR can tell you what the model is for before it asks.

In 3.0.11 there is exactly one thing that can appear in that list:

• Background removal — about 179 MB, fetched from GitHub the first time you ask Collages to cut a subject out of its background.

Corrected 17 September 2026. This section used to list three models — face restoration at 337 MB and photo upscaling at 34 MB alongside the background remover — and said you could install any of them here. Neither is true of a shipping 3.0.11 build. The Photo Enhancement cards that would install those two are part of the Viewer feature that is switched off in this version, so they are not on the screen and the files cannot be downloaded at all. The earlier wording described a state only a development machine reaches.

The models are stored in %APPDATA%\Photo Date Rescue\ai-models\, which belongs to the whole installation rather than to one profile, so a second profile does not download it again. Once a model is on your disk it runs on your computer, and the photos you use it on are not sent anywhere. Removing it frees the space, and PDR offers the download again next time you use something that needs it.

Limitations

• This list is not your whole AI footprint, and PDR says so. The face, object and speech models that come with photo analysis are fetched separately, are shared by every profile, and are neither listed nor removable here — and the captions model alone is around 700 MB. Those are covered on the People page.
• You cannot pre-fetch anything. Because the list never installs, there is no way to download the background remover in advance of needing it — on a slow or metered connection you meet the 179 MB the moment you ask for your first cut-out.
• A download that is interrupted starts again from the beginning. There is no resume.
• The download is checked for size, not for contents. PDR rejects a file that arrives obviously truncated, but it does not verify the file against a published checksum or signature.
• Removing a model does not remove the results. Cut-outs you have already made stay as they are.
• The total under the list is a total of the list, not of PDR. PDR does add up what it has listed — These are using 179 MB on this computer — but that figure covers only the models above it. It is not the size of your library, your caches or the analysis models.

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When PDR asks you for a review

Once, at most, PDR puts a small card in the bottom corner asking how you are getting on. It is the only thing in the program that interrupts you without being asked, so it is worth saying plainly what decides it and how to end it.

It takes no account of how anything went. Not how well a Fix went, not how many files were skipped, nothing about the result at all. A customer whose every run has been a struggle is asked on exactly the same terms as one whose runs have been clean. Earlier builds did the opposite, putting a prompt at the end of any Fix they judged to have gone well. That is cherry-picking, which Trustpilot’s guidelines for businesses prohibit, and it was removed in 3.0.11.

What is left is a measure of use. All of the following have to be true at once:

• You bought PDR. A free trial is never asked.
• More than a week has passed since your first action.
• You have done something on at least five separate days.
• You have used more than one part of the app.
• You have done something on at least eight separate occasions.
• At least two thousand photos have been moved.

The occasions rule is the one doing the real work. One Fix counts as one occasion whether it placed thirty photos or thirty thousand, so a whole Google Takeout put through in a single afternoon is one occasion, not ten thousand, and no size of run can bring the question forward. Opening PDR and closing it again earns nothing either.

The card has three buttons and every one of them is a real answer. Don’t ask again ends it permanently on that computer. Maybe later puts it away for two months. Leave a review opens Trustpilot in your browser and also stops it coming back. There is no close cross, on purpose: a cross would record no answer, so the card would simply return on the next launch.

Limitations

• The count is per profile and per computer. It lives in review-usage.json beside that profile’s data. A second profile starts from nothing, and so does a second PC.
• There is no setting for it. It is not in the Settings window — the three buttons on the card are the whole of the control you have over it.
• Counting starts on your first day, not on the day you pay. That is deliberate: somebody who spent a fortnight on the free quota before buying has genuinely used PDR for a fortnight. It means the question can arrive sooner after a purchase than the list above might suggest.

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Known gaps in 3.0.11

If you came to this page to reclaim disk space, these are the four things to know:

1. There is no disk-space screen. The one figure PDR will give you is a single total per profile, in the profile menu in the title bar. It does not break that total down, it does not cover the shared folders, the unpacked archives or the models, and there is no control anywhere for clearing any of them.
2. Unpacked archives are not cleared when you quit. They persist by design, and the only automatic cleanups are the conservative one at launch and the one that runs when you remove the source.
3. Model downloads cannot be resumed, and are not verified against a checksum.
4. Settings are not backed up. The library backup covers your library database, not your preferences. Moving to a new PC means setting your preferences up again.

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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/settings-data#summary — and we will either correct the software or correct the page.