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).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 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>".
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"?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.