Share photos with people and devices

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

Photo Date Rescue does not send anything to the internet. There is no email, no upload, no shareable web link, no cloud folder and no posting to a social network. Not disabled, not behind a paywall, not planned-for-later — absent. If the person you want to send photos to is not on your Wi-Fi and not standing next to your printer, PDR will not deliver to them. You would export the files and use something else.

That is a real limitation and the comparison table scores it as one. It is also the deliberate consequence of the thing the product is for: your photos stay on your machine, so there is no account to create, no link that outlives your intentions, no copy sitting on somebody’s server, and nothing to revoke later because nothing was ever handed over.

Within that boundary there are five routes out, all local:

• Drag and drop — drag selected photos straight out of PDR into a folder, an email you are already writing, a chat window or any other application.
• Send to Phone — PDR shows a QR code; a phone on the same Wi-Fi scans it and downloads the files from your PC.
• Copy — Ctrl+C puts the actual files on the Windows clipboard, so Ctrl+V in Explorer or an email pastes the photos themselves rather than a picture of them. A single photo can also be copied as an image.
• Print, or Print to PDF — one, two or four to a page, or a contact sheet, to a printer or to a PDF file.
• Export as Parallel Library — copy a selection or a whole album into a dated folder structure somewhere else, such as a USB drive you then hand over.

None of these are limited on the free trial. The trial has nine lifetime caps — on files fixed, people in a tree, video clips, collages, carousels, screenshots and screen recordings — and not one of them applies to sharing, printing or exporting. What you have processed, you can get out.

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At a glance

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Getting photos to where they need to go

A nearby device, yes. A named person or a remote recipient, no. The comparison asks whether a tool can deliver to a nearby device, a named person, a private group or someone far away. PDR answers the first of those four and none of the others.

What works

• A phone or tablet on the same Wi-Fi. Select photos, choose Send to Phone, and PDR starts a small web server on your PC and shows a QR code. The phone’s camera app scans it, a plain page opens in the phone’s browser, and the photos download. Any phone works; there is nothing to install and no account on either end.
• Another application on the same PC. Drag photos out of PDR, or copy them with Ctrl+C and paste. If you want to email six photos, this is the route: you write the email in your own mail program and paste the files in.
• A printer, or a PDF. A real print layout with a choice of one, two or four photos to a page, or a contact sheet.
• A drive you hand to someone. Export as Parallel Library writes an organized, dated copy to any folder you choose, including a USB stick or an external disk.

What does not exist

• No email is sent by PDR. There is no mail integration at all.
• No web link. Nothing you can send to someone in another town.
• No upload to Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive or anywhere else.
• No shared album, no invited group, no recipient list, no named person.
• No posting to Facebook, Instagram or any other network from inside PDR.
• No AirDrop or Windows Nearby Share integration — Send to Phone is PDR’s own Wi-Fi route, not the operating system’s.

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What the recipient actually receives

The original file, byte for byte, with its metadata intact. This is the row PDR is strongest on, and it is strongest for an unglamorous reason: PDR does not process the file on the way out. It copies it.

• Send to Phone streams the file straight off your disk. Nothing is re-encoded, nothing is resized, nothing is recompressed. The filename is preserved, and the phone is told the correct file type so it opens properly.
• Export as Parallel Library is a plain file copy into a dated folder structure. The files that land at the far end are identical to the ones you selected.
• Drag and drop, and Ctrl+C hand Windows the real file paths, so whatever you drop them into receives the real files.
• Dates and metadata survive. Nothing on the way out strips or rewrites EXIF or XMP. The dates PDR repaired are the dates that arrive — which, given what this product is for, is the whole point of the exercise.

The two exceptions, and one thing you cannot do

• Print is a picture of your photos, not your photos. Obviously. A printed page or a print-to-PDF is a laid-out raster and carries no metadata.
• Copying a single photo as an image puts a bitmap on the clipboard, without metadata. Ctrl+C on a selection copies the files and does keep everything.
• You cannot send a smaller version. There is no “resize to 2000px”, no quality slider, no strip-my-location-before-sending option. It is the original or nothing. If you want a lighter copy for someone, you make it elsewhere — and if you wanted the location removed before sending, PDR will not do that for you.

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Where the data goes, and who can get at it

Nothing is uploaded. Ever. No photo, no thumbnail, no filename and no index leaves your machine as part of sharing. There is no vendor storage, no third-party service in the path and no telemetry carrying image data. You can verify this the blunt way: unplug the network entirely, and every route on this page except Send to Phone still works — and Send to Phone needs only your own Wi-Fi, not an internet connection.

How Send to Phone is controlled

• Only the photos you selected are reachable. The server serves a fixed list built when you started the share. There is no way to walk out of it to the rest of your disk.
• The address is unguessable. Every share carries a fresh 128-bit random token. Without it the server returns nothing.
• It expires by itself after fifteen minutes.
• You can revoke it instantly by closing the window. The server stops immediately, and the app tells you so: closing stops the share.

The caveat, stated plainly

The Wi-Fi leg is not encrypted. Send to Phone runs a plain HTTP server on your local network, not HTTPS. Somebody else already on the same Wi-Fi who could both observe your traffic and obtain the token could download the same files. On a home network that is a small risk. On a hotel, café or conference network it is a real one, and we would rather you heard that here than discovered it later. There is also no password or PIN you can set: the token in the URL is the only credential, and anyone you show the QR code to can use it for fifteen minutes.

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Progress, failures and interruptions

You can see what is happening. You cannot resume it if it breaks.

What you are shown

• Send to Phone shows a live count of how many files have been downloaded, updating every couple of seconds while the window is open.
• Export as Parallel Library shows a real progress bar with the number of files copied out of the total, and the name of the file it is on. It can be canceled part-way, and it reports how many copied and how many failed.
• Print shows that it is working, and reports a failure if it cannot produce the PDF.

What is missing

• No resume. A Parallel Library export that is canceled or interrupted leaves the files it already copied where they are. Starting again begins from the beginning; there is a skip-duplicates option that softens this, but it is not a resume.
• No retry. Nothing is attempted a second time automatically.
• Failures are reported generically. A full disk and a permissions problem are not distinguished for you. You get a message saying it did not work rather than a message saying why, which is the difference between a two-minute fix and an afternoon.
• The download count does not tell you who. Send to Phone counts downloads. It does not tell you which files were taken, or by which device, so on a share to two phones you cannot tell whether both finished.

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How many steps, and what the other person has to do

No account, ever, on either end. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into, and nothing the recipient has to install.

• Drag and drop: select, drag, drop. Three actions.
• Send to Phone: select, open Send to Phone, scan the code with the phone’s ordinary camera, tap the link, save. The recipient needs a camera and a browser, which is every phone made this decade.
• Print: select, choose the layout and paper, then the normal Windows print dialog.
• Export as Parallel Library: the longest of them — pick a destination, choose copy or move, choose how the folders should be dated, start, wait. It is a considered operation rather than a quick send, and it is presented as one.

The one thing you have to know that is not obvious: the phone must be on the same Wi-Fi as the PC. If it is on mobile data, the QR code will not reach anything. PDR tells you if the PC has no local network connection, but it cannot tell what the phone is doing.

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The limits, including one applied quietly

There are two limits worth knowing, both on Send to Phone. Everything else is bounded only by your disk and your network.

• 200 files per share. A single Send to Phone session serves at most 200 files.
• Fifteen minutes. The share stops by itself after fifteen minutes, whether or not the download finished. Start it again if you need longer.

The quiet one

If you select more than 200 photos, the extras are dropped without a word. The window heading updates to show the number it will actually serve — so it will say 200 where you expected 500 — but nothing tells you that 300 were left behind, and nothing tells you which 300. If you are sending a big selection, check that heading against what you selected. We consider this a defect rather than a design, and it is recorded as one.

What is not limited

• No file-size cap. A 4 GB video goes over the same route as a 2 MB photo.
• No storage or transfer quota, because there is no storage and no service — the files are on your disk and the network is yours.
• No cap on printing, dragging, copying or Parallel Library exports.
• No trial restriction on any of it. The nine trial caps cover fixing files, tree people, clips, collages, carousels, screenshots and recordings. Sharing is not among them.

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Whether the recipient can use it, and whether you can without a mouse

This row has two halves, and we can answer one of them honestly and not the other.

The recipient’s half: broad

Send to Phone asks nothing of the person receiving beyond a phone with a camera and a browser. No account, no app, no platform requirement, no plan. iPhone or Android, borrowed or their own. That is about as low a bar as this row can be set at, and it is set there deliberately.

Your half: untested

We do not know whether a share can be completed by keyboard alone or with a screen reader, because nobody has tried it. What we can say is that the buttons are real buttons and can be reached with Tab, and that the close controls are labeled. What we can also say is that the sharing windows are not built on a dialog component, so they do not trap focus — Tab can wander out into the page behind — and that several of the choice controls in the print and export windows are styled buttons without the radio-group semantics a screen reader needs to announce them as a set of options.

That describes the construction, not the experience. Whether someone using assistive technology can actually get photos onto a phone with it is a question only testing answers, and until we have done that testing the comparison table records this as unknown rather than giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt.

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Handing photos over without a copy landing on somebody’s server

Yes. Sending to a phone works over your own Wi-Fi. PDR opens a small, short-lived connection point on your PC and shows a code the phone scans; the phone then takes the files straight from your computer. Nothing passes through us, nothing is stored anywhere but the two devices, and there is no account, no link and nothing to revoke afterwards because nothing was ever handed over. The connection stops working after fifteen minutes or when you close it, whichever comes first. See where the data goes for how the share itself is controlled.

To do it

1. Select the photos, then choose Send to Phone.
2. Scan the code with the phone. The transfer runs directly between the two devices.
3. Close the window when you are finished. The connection point stops immediately rather than waiting out its fifteen minutes.

Limitations

• It only works between devices on the same network. There is no fallback that routes through a service — by design — so there is no way to reach someone who is not on your Wi-Fi. This is the deliberate cost of the guarantee above, not an oversight.
• Anyone on that network who sees the code can use it. For as long as the share is open, the code is the only credential. There is no password or PIN to add.
• The connection is not encrypted. That is fine on your own home network and worth thinking about on a shared, workplace or public one, where somebody else on the same network could in principle take the same files. The caveat is set out in full under where the data goes.

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Getting a selection onto a phone over your own Wi-Fi

Yes. Select the photos, choose to send them to a phone, and a code appears. The phone’s camera scans it, its ordinary browser opens, and the photos are there to save — one at a time, or all at once as a single archive. The phone needs no app, no account and no setup, which means it works just as well on a phone you have borrowed as on your own. Nothing is re-encoded on the way; see what the recipient actually receives.

To do it

1. Select the photos you want, then choose Send to Phone.
2. Point the phone’s camera at the code and open the link it offers.
3. Save the photos individually, or take everything in one go as a single archive.

Limitations

• Both devices must be on the same Wi-Fi. A phone on mobile data cannot reach your PC, and this is the single most common reason a scan appears to do nothing.
• Some networks deliberately stop devices talking to each other. Many workplace and public networks do exactly this, and a firewall on the PC can block it too. In either case the code simply does not work, and PDR does not explain why — you are left to work out which of several causes it was.
• There is no way to resume an interrupted download. If the transfer breaks part-way, you scan again and start over.
• There is a cap on how many files one share carries, and it is applied quietly. See the limits before sending a large selection.

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Whether the dated structure survives the trip

No. Send to Phone does not carry your folder structure across, by any route. Whether you take everything at once or save photos one at a time, what arrives on the phone is a flat set of pictures.

The phone is not the reason. PDR puts every photo in the archive at the top level, with no folders at all, so there is no structure for the phone to ignore. This is our limitation to remove, not the handset’s.

What to do instead

1. Send to Phone is for getting a handful of pictures onto a phone quickly. Treat it that way, and do not rely on it to move a library.
2. To move a library with its dated folders intact, copy the destination folder itself — over USB, or with a file-sync app — rather than sending it through PDR.
3. If two photos in your selection share a filename, expect one of them to arrive under a slightly different name, because a flat archive cannot hold both.

Limitations

• The archive has no folders in it. Not dated ones, not any others. Every photo sits at the top level.
• Saving photos one at a time gives no structure either. They land together in the phone’s downloads, in whatever order they arrive.
• Filename clashes are resolved by renaming. Because everything is flat, two photos that were told apart only by the folder they sat in can no longer both keep their name.

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Dragging a selection straight into another application

Yes — and read the first limitation before you try it, because Windows can move your files out of the library rather than copy them. Photos and videos can be dragged straight out of PDR into another program: a chat window, an email you are already writing, a document. It is the real file that arrives, not a preview. Select several and drag any one of them and the whole selection goes.

To do it

1. Select the photos you want.
2. Drag one of them into the application you want them in.
3. If you are dropping into a File Explorer window, hold Ctrl as you drop.

Limitations

• Warning: dropping into a File Explorer window on the same drive makes Windows move the file, not copy it — which takes it out of your library. Windows decides this, based on where you dropped it, and PDR cannot override it. Hold Ctrl while you drop to force a copy. Better still, drag into applications only, and use the library’s own tools when you want files put into folders.
• The receiving program decides what it accepts. Video tiles drag the same way photo tiles do, and it is the real video file that arrives — but a program that only takes images will refuse the drop. If that happens, use the phone or print routes instead — see getting a selection onto a phone.
• The receiving program gets the real file. If it deletes or moves that file, it is gone from your library too. A program that tidies up after itself can take your original with it.

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Printing, or producing a PDF, without leaving the library

Yes. A selection can go straight to a printer or be saved as a PDF, without exporting the files first. You choose how many photos to a page — one, two, four, or a contact sheet — the paper size, including the common photo sizes, portrait or landscape, whether pictures are fitted whole or cropped to fill, and color or black and white. It all happens on your machine; there is no print service involved and nothing is uploaded to lay the page out.

To do it

1. Select the photos and choose to print them.
2. Pick the layout, the paper size, the orientation, fit or fill, and color or black and white.
3. Send it to a printer, or save it as a PDF instead.

Limitations

• Margins are set by the paper size you pick. They cannot be adjusted.
• Nothing can be added to the page. No captions, no dates, no titles — apart from filenames on a contact sheet. If you wanted the repaired date printed under each photo, PDR will not do that.
• The layouts are the four offered. There is no custom grid and no way to change how the photos are placed.
• There is no preview before the printer dialogue. You find out what the page looks like by producing it, which on paper is an expensive way to find out — save a PDF first.

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Known gaps in 3.0.4

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

• No remote delivery of any kind — no email, no link, no upload, no social posting.
• No named recipients, shared albums or private groups.
• No option to send a resized, recompressed or metadata-stripped copy.
• The Send to Phone Wi-Fi leg is plain HTTP, not encrypted.
• No password or PIN on a share; the token in the URL is the only credential.
• Selecting more than 200 files for a share silently drops the extras.
• No resume and no retry after an interrupted or failed transfer or export.
• Full-disk and permission failures are reported generically rather than by cause.
• The download counter does not say which files, or which device.
• Print output carries no metadata, and a single photo copied as an image carries none.
• Keyboard-only and screen-reader operation of the sharing windows are untested, and those windows do not trap focus.

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How to check any of this yourself

• That there is no remote route: select some photos and look through every menu for Email, Upload, Link, Post or Share to anything. There is Send to Phone, Print, Copy and Export as Parallel Library, and that is the list.
• That nothing is uploaded: disconnect from the internet but stay on Wi-Fi, then run Send to Phone. It works. Now disconnect from Wi-Fi as well and try again — PDR will tell you it cannot find a local network.
• That the file is the original: send a photo to your phone, copy it back to the PC, and compare its size and its EXIF against the file PDR sent. They match.
• The fifteen-minute expiry: start a share, leave the window open, and come back after twenty minutes. The link on the phone will no longer work.
• Revocation: start a share, load the page on the phone, then close the window on the PC. Refresh on the phone — it is gone.
• The 200 cap: select 250 photos and open Send to Phone. Read the number in the heading. It will say 200.
• No resize option: look for a quality, size or “strip location” setting anywhere in the sharing flow. There is not one.

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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 sharing photos walks through doing this rather than describing what is possible. Back up covers getting a second copy somewhere safe, which is a different job from getting a copy to a person, and Organize covers finding the photos you want to send.