Microsoft Image Composite Editor (DotNET panorama utility)

[Midas]

MS ICE (http://research.microsoft.com/ice/) looked interesting enough for me to test.

The installer provided can be extracted with the likes of LessMSI but as expected it isn't portable at all -- settings are stored in an '%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Ice.exe_Url_{random_string}' folder; other folders were created at '%APPDATA%\Microsoft\ApplicationInsights', '%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Image Composite Editor' (for embedded ads!) and in the system's %TEMP% folder (for caching).

The required DotNET is v4.5.

• Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Computational Photography Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. ICE can also create a panorama from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. Finished panoramas can be shared with friends and viewed in 3D by uploading them to the Photosynth web site. Panoramas can also be saved in a wide variety of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD/PSB format, as well as the multiresolution tiled format used by HD View and Deep Zoom.

  • 

The latest MS ICE 32 or 64-bit release (currently v2.0) can be downloaded from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... jects/ice/.

[Userfriendly]

Its a very useful app. I use it to stitch together panning shots in anime which are usually just static images.

I've asked tproli here http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... 304#p73304 if it was somehow possible to portablize with yap. No dice. Random string folder name is an amazing way to stop apps from being portable. Best idea I can think of is a wildcard search to delete the settings on exit which is no big deal since it only has 3 settings which aren't that important to keep.

You can also get the older 1.4.4 version here:
x32 - http://filehippo.com/download_microsoft ... iteeditor/
x64 - http://download.cnet.com/Image-Composit ... 07152.html

[Midas]

I've asked tproli here http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... 304#p73304 if it was somehow possible to portablize with yap. No dice. Random string folder name is an amazing way to stop apps from being portable. Best idea I can think of is a wildcard search to delete the settings on exit which is no big deal since it only has 3 settings which aren't that important to keep.

• All credit to you, Userfriendly.
  
  FYI, if you edit 'ICE.exe.config' in program folder (it's a straightforward XML file), you can set your own choices for updates check and cache folder locations, making that 2 out of 3.
  
  You could then just delete everything else, as you proposed...
  
  And please share your yaP config if you ever make one.

[smaragdus]

@Midas

The installer provided can be extracted with the likes of LessMSI but as expected it isn't portable at all -- settings are stored in an '%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Ice.exe_Url_{random_string}' folder; other folders were created at '%APPDATA%\Microsoft\ApplicationInsights', '%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Image Composite Editor' (for embedded ads!) and in the system's %TEMP% folder (for caching).

M$ is the greatest ever enemy of portability. Softpedia lists MICE as ad-ware. Hugin (also mentioned here) is not portable either, but at least it is clean, open-source and cross-platform. Isn't Hugin good enough for you? Needless to say I would not touch the ad-ware MICE.

[Userfriendly]

FYI, if you edit 'ICE.exe.config' in program folder (it's a straightforward XML file), you can set your own choices for updates check and cache folder locations, making that 2 out of 3.
[/list]

I was aware of that but it always saved some other settings in user.config. However since you mentioned it, I checked again and remembered the one setting I didn't touch because I thought it might have been important. Apparently if you set "HasCheckedForImageCacheEnvironmentVariable" to "True" and "UserId" to whatever random UUID string in the "ICE.exe.config" file then it won't create the "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Ice.exe_Url_{random_string}" folder as long as you don't change the settings within the app. Not sure how important it is for it to check for image cache environment variable on first start though. Config looks like this:

Code: Select all

      <setting name="HasCheckedForImageCacheEnvironmentVariable" serializeAs="String">
        <value>True</value>
      </setting>
      <setting name="UserId" serializeAs="String">
        <value>0fc4a55c-e0db-4eab-841f-17caeb5e150c</value>
      </setting>

So in yaP, all we would need is these:

Code: Select all

[AFTER]
-dir = %TEMP%\Image Composite Editor
-dir = %LocalAppdata%\Microsoft\ApplicationInsights
-dir = %LocalAppdata%\Image Composite Editor

It downloads ads.xml from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=510775.

I think v1.4.4 is even more portable with that method since it doesn't create the ad folder or ApplicationInsights. Only the cache in temp.

[Midas]

M$ is the greatest ever enemy of portability.

• Agreed. But you can never have too many options here at TPFC, IMHO.
  
  @Userfriendly: TY. Great info.