Cheez - image cataloging tool

Kea · **Posted:** Sat Jan 09, 2010 3:34 pm

Cheez: http://daremon.gr/cheez/index.php

Quote:

Cheez is a powerful, yet easy to use, image cataloguing tool. It's main purpose is to help people with digital cameras organize, enhance and share their photos and video clips. Of course it can be used for any kind of image collection.

For every media file in your collection, Cheez can store any information that you may enter (such as a description, a number of keywords or a date). It uses a single text file (XML format) for that purpose, making backups very easy. Searching is quite powerful and fast while other features include editing, printing, slideshow, mailing, web albums, exif and many others.

I've been looking for some portable software that makes it possible to add multiple keywords to image files and then search the images based on the keywords. It is important to use portable software, as the idea is to copy all my photos (many thousands) to several extern HD:s or DVD:s, and use the software to find the image I'm looking for (my husband and the dog fishing from the boat - keywords: Kjell, dog fishing, boat).

I din't find any explicit portable software of that type, but I did find Cheez. I tried to Uniextract the program from the installation file, but Cheez didn't start. So I installed it. Then I copied the program folder to an USB stick, and started from the stick. It worked perfectly well.

Now I moved the USB stick to another computer, copied some image folders to the program folder "Films" and started Cheez. It couldn't find the "database file" (the images). In the XML file that was created when I started on the first computer, I changed "<fname>L:\Films\</fname>" to "<fname>..\Films\</fname>", and that was the solution.

Finally I moved the USB stick to a third computer and started Cheez in Sandboxie. No problems - I can't find any significant entries made by Cheez in the registry and none at all in any folder outside the program folder. The XML line didn't change back to "<fname>L:\Films\</fname>" Or any other unit). It's still "<fname>..\Films\</fname>".

Quote:

Cheez needs no shared DLLs and no registry keys. This means you can write your installation folder to a CD/DVD and run Cheez from there.

So with Cheez as a "shell around" the image folders and an autorun on the extern HD, it seems as I have what I was looking for. But is there a catch somewhere, something that makes Cheez not portable? If not, maybe Cheez could be considered as a "Portable Freeware Submission"?

taotra · **Joined:** Thu Mar 12, 2009 10:25 am **Posts:** 36

Kea wrote:

I've been looking for some portable software that makes it possible to add multiple keywords to image files and then search the images based on the keywords. It is important to use portable software, ...

You can also use Xnview.
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=30

Right-click on an image, then click on "Edit IPTC data", go to the Keywords tab and add as many words as you like.
To then search your image database by keywords or any other search terms you've added (e.g., captions, categories, etc.) click on "Search files", check the IPTC box, select the field and add the search term. That's it.

Kea · **Posted:** Sun Jan 10, 2010 4:22 am

Yes, XnView is OK, but what about the dependencies (MSVCR71.DLL and MSVCP71.DLL)? And I can't use IPTC data on PNG, BMP or GIF.

taotra · **Joined:** Thu Mar 12, 2009 10:25 am **Posts:** 36

On Windows-based computers these dependencies are not a problem. You could also copy the two dll files to the Xnview application folder.

With regards to the different image formats you can bypass the IPTC data and use the description option.
Right-click on an image, select Describe and enter as many keywords in the Description field.
When using Search Files uncheck the Format option (searches any image format), check Description and enter your keywords. That will do it.

Cheez - image cataloging tool

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