Viewing, rotating and trimming

What the Viewer changes, what it leaves alone, and the one thing it does not do at all.

Checked against Photo Date Rescue 3.0.4 on Windows. Everything below is something you can reach from the Viewer window in the shipping build.

The Viewer is where you look at one file properly rather than as a thumbnail. It is also where PDR does the small number of things that change a picture or a video — and the thing worth knowing before you start is that none of them write to the file you are looking at. Rotation is remembered rather than re-saved. A trimmed clip is a new file. A cut-out subject is a new file. Your original is what it always was.

At a glance

What you want to do	What PDR does about it
Turn a photo the right way up	Remembered by PDR, everywhere. Your file is not re-saved or re-compressed.
Keep just the good bit of a video	Saves a new clip beside the original. One start and one end per save.
Lift the subject out of a photo	Saves a new picture. Transparent PNG, unless you pick a backdrop.
Put captions on a home video	Works, on your own machine. First use downloads about 700 MB.
Open a RAW file or an AVCHD video	It will say “File not found”. The file is fine; the Viewer cannot draw it.
Sharpen or restore an old photo with AI	Not available in 3.0.4. Don't go looking for it.

Rotating a photo without damaging it

Two buttons on the toolbar turn the picture in 90° steps, and R and Shift + R do the same from the keyboard. The rotation sticks: the photo stays that way round in the Viewer, in Memories, in your albums, and the next time you open PDR.

The important part is what does not happen. Plenty of programs rotate a JPEG by decoding it and encoding it again, which throws away a little quality every time. PDR does not do that. It records the angle against the file in its own library and draws the picture turned. Your file on disk is not opened for writing, not re-compressed and not modified in any way.

Limitations

The rotation lives in PDR, not in the file. That is the price of not re-saving it. Open the same photo in Windows Photos, email it to somebody, or copy it to a memory stick, and it will be the original way round. If you need the rotation to travel with the file, you need a tool that rewrites the file, and PDR is deliberately not that tool.
Photos only. The rotate buttons do nothing to a video — the code stops before it starts if the file is a video.
90° steps only. There is no free-angle rotation and no straighten-the-horizon control in the Viewer.

Cutting a clip out of a video

Set where you want the clip to start and where you want it to end, and save. PDR writes a new video file next to the original, with the same name and _T on the end, and adds it to your library. If that name is taken it adds a number rather than overwriting anything.

The original video is never opened for writing. If you decide the clip was wrong, delete the clip; the source is untouched.

Limitations

One continuous cut per save. You set a start and an end, so it is a single piece of the video. There is no multi-segment editing: to keep two separate moments from one video, save twice and you get two clips. This is a real limit, not a setting you have missed.
The clip is re-encoded, not copied. It is written at high quality, but it is not a lossless extraction of the original frames.
On a free trial you can save ten clips in total. After that the save is refused with a message, and the count does not reset.
It needs the bundled video engine. If that cannot start, PDR tells you it cannot trim rather than saving something wrong.

Lifting the subject out of a photo

PDR can separate the subject of a photo from its background and save the result as a new picture, named after the original with _BG added. It lands in your PDR Captures folder, filed under the month, and appears in your library. The photo you started from is not changed.

What you get depends on whether you choose a new backdrop. Leave the background empty and you get a PNG with real transparency — the thing you want if you are going to drop the subject onto a collage. Choose a color or another photo as the backdrop and PDR flattens the result into a JPEG instead, because there is no longer any transparency to keep.

Limitations

It needs a one-off download the first time. The subject detection is an optional component that is not installed with PDR. Until it is installed, the feature will not run. The download comes to you; your photo is not sent anywhere, and the detection runs on your own machine.
Photos only. The whole section is hidden when you are looking at a video.
It is automatic, not a selection tool. There is no brush to correct an edge the detector got wrong. If it cuts through somebody's hair, your options are to accept it or to use something else.

Captions for a home video

Open a video in the Viewer and there is a CC button on the toolbar. Press it and PDR listens to the soundtrack and writes out what was said, with timings, then shows it as subtitles over the picture. Press CC again to hide them and again to bring them back. It is the single most useful thing PDR does with an old family video, because it turns half-audible kitchen chatter into something you can actually read.

The listening happens on your computer. Your video is not uploaded and no part of the audio is sent anywhere. PDR extracts the soundtrack, hands it to a speech model running on your own processor, and writes the result into its library.

The first time you do this, PDR downloads the speech model — and it is roughly 700 MB, not the 150 MB the app tells you. The confirmation box in 3.0.4 says “downloads the model (~150 MB)”. That figure is left over from an earlier, smaller model; the one that actually ships is Whisper Large v3 Turbo, and the build's own notes put it at about 720 MB on disk. We would rather tell you the real number here than have you start it on a metered connection. It is a one-off: it is kept in your PDR data folder and every video after the first uses the copy you already have. This is a defect in the app, and it is logged as one.

After the download, expect the transcription itself to take a while — it is doing real work on your CPU, and a long video takes longer than a short one. A progress bar shows you where it is. When it finishes, PDR tells you how many seconds of audio it covered and turns the captions on for you.

If the video has no usable speech — music only, or voices too far from the microphone — PDR says “No speech found” and explains why rather than saving you an empty caption track. You can try that video again later.

Limitations

English only, in practice. The model can handle other languages, but the Viewer gives you no way to choose one and always asks for English. A video in another language will produce poor results, not an error.
It quietly writes a subtitle file next to your video. Alongside holiday.mp4 you will find a new holiday.vtt. That is deliberate — it means VLC and most other players will show the same captions without PDR — but PDR does not tell you it has done it. It is the one thing on this page that puts a new file in your own folders rather than in PDR's.
There is no way to delete a transcript. Once a video is transcribed, the Viewer offers you no button to remove it and start again. You can delete the .vtt yourself, but PDR's own copy stays.
You cannot edit the captions. What the model heard is what you get. There is no correction pass for a misheard name.
Videos only. There is nothing equivalent for a photo.

When the Viewer says “File not found” and the file is right there

This is worth knowing before it happens to you, because the message is misleading. PDR indexes more formats than the Viewer can draw. A file that PDR found, dated and filed perfectly well can still fail to appear when you open it, and the message you get is “File not found” next to the full path of a file that is plainly there.

Nothing is wrong with your file. The ones this affects are:

RAW photos — .cr2, .nef, .arw and the rest. PDR reads their dates and includes them in a Fix run. It cannot display them.
Layered and less common still formats — .psd, and many .tif files.
AVCHD and DVD-era video — .mts, .m2ts, .vob. These are exactly the files a camcorder or a ripped disc gives you, and they are the most likely of the lot to catch you out: PDR lists them, but the Viewer does not recognize them as video at all, so it tries to show them as a picture and fails.

Do not read “File not found” as a sign that PDR has moved or lost your file. It means the Viewer could not decode it. Open it in the program you normally use and it will be fine. We have logged the wording as a defect — it should say the format cannot be displayed.

What the Viewer plays reliably: .mp4, .mov, .m4v, .avi, .mkv, .webm, .wmv, .flv, .3gp, .mpg and .mpeg. For what PDR can read dates from, which is a longer list, see formats and metadata.

AI photo enhancement is not in this version

PDR 3.0.4 does not offer AI face restoration, AI sharpening or AI upscaling, and there is no way to turn them on. We are saying this plainly because the words turn up in enough photo software that people go hunting for the button, and there isn't one to find. It is not hidden behind a setting, a license tier or a beta flag. The panel that would hold those controls is not shown, and nothing in the app shows it.

Do not confuse this with lifting the subject out of a photo, which is a different feature and does work. Both are sometimes described as “AI photo tools”; only one of them is something you can actually use here.

Known gaps in 3.0.4

Things the Viewer does not do. If one of these is what you came for, you will save time knowing now.

No AI enhancement, restoration or upscaling. As above.
No multi-segment video editing. One start and one end per saved clip.
Rotation does not travel with the file. It is recorded in PDR, so other programs see the original orientation.
No cropping of photos in the Viewer. Cropping exists inside the collage editor, on a tile, not as a way of editing a photo in your library.
No brightness, contrast or color adjustment on a library photo. Those controls exist for collage tiles only, and affect the collage rather than the photo.
Rotation cannot be undone with Ctrl+Z. Rotate the other way to put it back.
RAW, .psd and AVCHD video cannot be displayed, even though PDR indexes and dates them. See “File not found” above for what you will actually see.
No frame-by-frame stepping in a video. You can scrub and you can slow the playback down, but there is no control that advances a single frame.
Captions cannot be edited or deleted. A transcript, once made, is what it is.

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/viewer-video#summary — and we will either correct the software or correct the page.