Exporting Images and database with functionality to external HDD

[michaelw]

I have a large number of images (400,000 +) that I am gradually working my way through using ACDSee Ultimate 2021. Not done much in the past few months as been busy with "life"

I want to export all of the images and the required ACDSee Ultimate 2021 to an external HDD so that I when I visit my children I can take the External HDD and show them the images and be able to search and display etc using ACDSee.

All I want to be able to do is search for a find specific images or collections of images. I do not need to do any editing etc.

Is there a way of having a portable installation of ACDSee 2021 on a HDD without having to install a separate copy of ACDSee Ultimate 2021 on their PCs?

If this cannot be done in ACDSee Ultimate 2021 can anyway suggest an alternative methodology.

Thank in anticipation of any assistance.

Regards

Michael

[MrSteveVee]

If you are using Tags stored in the IPTC you could use other open source programs, I think maybe Digicam or exiftool does this sort of search but not 100% sure

[Regor250]

Although ACDSee can be installed on the external drive, I assume that it still requires to have access to the properly set up Windows Registry to function, hence you may not run ACDSee from your external drive alone, which is also true of any application that needs access to the registry. The Ultimate license I believe allows for 3 systems install (desktop and a laptop install would give you the flexibility), which might be the only way, but that is what you are hoping to avoid. You'd have to make sure that the database also resides on your external drive, and open that database from the other computer. The IPTC option is limited, and with 400K images would be extremely slow.