Storing a Viewer with my off site Archive

The recent hassles with a couple of my hardrive backups has got me thinking again about creating a real long term archive, one that will be useful to someone else. It is a total can of worms because the formats are not all the same, I have mainly jpeg (.jpg) version of most things but I also have original RAW files and some post processed versions as .tiff and occasionally .psd formats. It would be presumptive of me to assume that however gets the drive will know about these formats and have the software to be able to read them (the exception being the jpeg format).

I had contemplated including a downloaded (install/setup) version of adobe bridge for both Window and Mac operating systems. Instead I opted for something that doesn’t require installing and can be just run from the archive disk itself. What I choose was XnViewPortable, one of the portable apps that I have on my travelling DarkRoom USB key. It is the one viewer I have found that handles an amazing number of formats. As well as JPEG it seems to handle most RAW file format including .cr2 .pef & .dng and also handles .tiff and .psd. So all the formats I currently use could be viewed. This program is a single .exe file that can be run on any DOS or microsoft windows operating system. There is also a version called XnViewMP that allow for the other operating systems (eg. Mac & Linux) to view all these formats so I also include the READ.ME file below on the Archive Disk.

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This disk contains archived photographs, in a variety of formats.
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The subdirectory XnViewProtable contains a viewer program that can be run on any
Microsoft Windows computer. If you want to view the photos on other operating
systems look for the program XnViewMP (the MP stands for multi-platform) on the
internet and download the version for your operating system.
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