PD5 Converter

Extract text from Photo Gallery info files (PD5)


Drop or upload your .PD5 file
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How to extract text from your PD5 file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your PD5 file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert PD5 to another file type

To convert PD5 info files to another format, you need Windows Live Photo Gallery or other Database software.

Convert a file to PD5

To convert other file formats to the "Photo Gallery Index" file type, you need software like Windows Live Photo Gallery or a similar tool.


About PD5 files

A .PD5 file is an internal proprietary database format used by the discontinued Windows Live Photo Gallery. Specifically, it is usually named Pictures.pd5 and serves as a local catalog. It stores metadata, thumbnail caches, image resolution details, face recognition tags, and file path references for photos and videos managed by the software. Created by Microsoft, this format was part of the Windows Essentials suite. Today, it is largely obsolete since the software has not been supported since 2017. Users frequently seek to open or convert .PD5 files because they stumble upon a massive multi-gigabyte file on their hard drive and mistakenly believe it contains their actual photos. A major disadvantage of this format is that it is a closed, proprietary database. Without the original software, the file is practically locked. Furthermore, if the index becomes corrupted, the software often abandons it and creates a new one, leaving behind useless OLD_Pictures.pd5 files that waste storage space. Because this file does not hold actual image or video data, standard online converters fail to process it. You cannot convert a .PD5 to a JPG or MP4. However, if you need to recover lost tags or file structures, the best conversion targets are CSV, TXT, or JSON. Exporting to these standard database formats allows you to read the raw text metadata, though you will lose the proprietary thumbnail caches. This file format is difficult to open or convert because its internal schema is unpublished, meaning only the original software can properly read or export the data. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format (like raw text strings or SQLite tables), viewing or conversion may still be possible.

Convert.Guru analyzes your PD5 file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted PD4, PD1 and UNF files.


FAQ

If you want to convert PD5 file to , you can use Windows Live Photo Gallery or similar software from the "Photo Metadata Database" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert files to PD5, try Windows Live Photo Gallery or another comparable tool in the "Photo Metadata Database" category.



The PD5 Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our PD5 converter.