A free, portable digital darkroom

Wouldn't it be great, when away from your home PC, to able to carry around your latest photos and the software to view and edit them. For example, you may wish to edit your photos at work, but not have the means to install software on your office PC.

I carry around with me a 512 Mb USB flash drive. This allows me to view, edit and upload photos to my favorite photo sharing service from any PC. The software runs directly on the USB drive, so you are not installing software or making any changes to the PC you are using.

Here's how to create your own portable digital darkroom:

I recommend at least a 512Mb USB Drive, such as this one. The software will install on a 256Mb drive, but you won't have much space left to store photos.

Install the following software on the drive (instructions are taken from portablefreeware.com) :

PhotoFiltre. Download from here.

PhotoFiltre is a freeware photo editor. Users of Photoshop or Elements will be very at home using this software. It will allow you to do basic image manipulation as well as some more advanced editing.

How to extract as a portable application: Download the installer and install to the default folder C:\Program Files\PhotoFiltre. Then copy all files (except Uninst.exe) into a folder of your choice on the USB drive. Finally, uninstall the program. Launch the program by double-clicking on PhotoFiltre.exe.

You may also wish to download the extra plugins, selections, masks and patterns from the website and unzip them directly into the program folder.


FastStone Image Image Viewer. Download from here

This is an excellent freeware image viewer, with a very easy to use user interface.

How to extract as a portable application: First, install the application on a PC and run it, clicking through whatever intro screens that appear. Then choose the menu item "Settings->Settings". On the bottom of the Viewer tab, there is a button labeled "Create Portable Application". Click this button, followed by "Yes", then choose the folder where you want to install the portable app.

Portable Firefox. Download from here.

Running the Firefox web-browser from a portable USB drive means that you can carry round a personalized web browser with you. This will mean that all of your bookmarks and saved passwords will be present wherever you are.

How to extract as a portable application: Follow the instructions on the download page.

Additional software.

I recommend loading the PStart utility onto your USB drive. This will allow you to easily start your portable applications from a menu on whichever PC you are using. Download PStart from here.

One downside to using a USB drive is that if you loose it, the information on the drive is accessible by anyone who finds it. This is easily solved by using an encrypter to 'scramble' and 'un-scramble' data on your drive. The one I use is Remora USB Disk Guard.

Tip : Don't forget to make regular backups of your USB flash drive.

Categories: usb, software