Portable Apps has done something very nifty. It makes a lot of Open Source apps portable to any USB Flash Stick – for free. Most notably for Picture That readers, Gimp. This means that I now have a very polished photo editor that I am carrying around on my key chain and can use on any PC that has a USB port (1.1 works fine but 2.0 ports are faster)>
The list of applications available on Portable Apps is growing very fast – 13 new programs registered in April alone including Open Office, Notepad++, Toucan, MacOS Classic on a Stick, and about 70 other programs, games, utilities. This is great stuff – well worth checking out.
I did some timings of loads from my Flash Stick through the USB port of Gimp and Open Office – and I saw load times comparable with the hard-disk versions. Slightly faster from the hard disk, but occasionally the Portable App versions were 20% faster. In general this user is a very happy camper.
This means I can do very good photo-editing just about anywhere. Since I have a USB port for SD and Flash cards now I don’t have to lug my laptop everywhere I go picture taking. I just sneak in to the nearest Cyber Cafe , plugin, photo-edit in Gimp, upload to my PixofToronto blog and another photo essay tale is filed.
Finally this is not a neutered version of GIMP but full 2.4.5 with masking, layering, brush tools and an array of color and sharpening corrections tools. This will compete with some of the very good online tools (see here for 5 very good ones); but the advanatge is that I don’t need an online connection and I get to take my work with me which can be handy. I certainly like my Gimp, Portable.