Making a Portable Installation

RawTherapee and the cache folder can be stored "self-contained" on a USB flash drive or any other mass-storage device.

For Windows
Get the latest build of RawTherapee. Since we want it portable, we don't want the installer, just the bare, zipped program. If the latest version on our website is in simple zipped form without an installer, you can skip this step. However, if it is an installer, you need to first extract the RawTherapee files.
 * If it is an Inno Setup installer (.exe extension, all recent Windows installers are Inno Setup ones at the time of writing, summer 2014), get innounp or innoextract to unpack it.
 * If it is an MSI installer (no recent Windows builds use this at the time of writing), fire up a command prompt and type:
 * msiexec /a RawTherapee.msi TARGETDIR="C:\TargetDir" /qb
 * Replace the name of the MSI installer and the target directory as appropriate. Spaces in the TargetDir path are allowed, as the path is enclosed in quotes.

Let's assume that you've unzipped your archive into E:\RawTherapee, where E:\ is the drive letter of your USB flash drive. Now open the E:\RawTherapee\options file, and set the MultiUser option to false. That way, the cache directory will be located in a subdirectory of the installation path.

For Linux
Getting RawTherapee to run off a portable medium such as a USB flash drive on various Linux systems is not straightforward due to the nature of Linux systems. While the Windows version of RawTherapee comes bundled with all required libraries to run on any Windows version, Linux distributions differ significantly from each other and as a result a version of RawTherapee built for one distribution is unlikely to run under a different distribution. Though it's unlikely that you can have a portable binary that runs from a USB stick on any distribution, what you can do is keep your configuration files portable, and then install RawTherapee on your target machine using that distribution's package manager, as builds of RawTherapee are available for most distributions. You could also put it on a live USB image, if you're ambihaxtrous :]

In order to backup your configuration you will want to copy RawTherapee's config folder onto your USB stick. Specifically, you want the "options" file, your custom "camconst.json" if you made one, and any custom PP3, ICC, DCP and LCP profiles. The File Paths article describes where to find these.