ScanTailor Advanced Portable: Run It From Any Folder or USB Drive

The official Windows release of ScanTailor Advanced is a portable build. There is no installer and no setup wizard: the program lives entirely inside the folder you extract from the ZIP, settings included, so you can carry it on a USB drive and run it on any Windows 10 or 11 machine. This page explains how the portable workflow works and how to keep your projects just as portable as the program.

What “Portable” Means Here

Download ScanTailor-Advanced-1.1.1x64.zip from the download page, extract it where you like — a folder on your PC, an external drive, or a USB stick — and run scantailor.exe. Nothing is installed system-wide, and the ZIP even ships a config folder inside the program directory where the application keeps its settings file (scantailor-advanced.ini), instead of scattering them across the machine. Delete the folder and the program is gone.

Two things a portable build cannot carry with it:

• The Visual C++ runtime. The pre-built binaries need Microsoft’s Visual C++ Redistributable (x64). Most Windows PCs already have it; on a fresh machine the program will report a missing VCRUNTIME140.dll until you install the redistributable once. The Windows guide covers this.
• Trust prompts. The binaries are unsigned, so SmartScreen may ask for confirmation the first time you run the program on a new machine. Verify the ZIP’s SHA-256 (printed on the download page) and then choose “More info” → “Run anyway”.

Keeping Projects Portable: Relative Project Paths

A program you can carry is only half the story — your work has to travel too. Since v1.1.1, ScanTailor Advanced supports relative project paths: project files reference their scanned images relative to the project’s own location instead of by absolute paths. In the project’s own words, this makes projects portable across different machines and folder structures.

In practice it means you can keep one folder per book — the raw scans and the .ScanTailor project file together — and move that whole folder to another drive or another computer, and the project still finds its images. Without relative paths, moving a project meant broken links to every page image.

A Simple Portable Setup

1. One drive, one structure. Keep the extracted program folder and a Projects folder side by side on your USB or external drive.
2. One folder per book. Put each book’s scans and its project file in a single folder, so the relative paths keep working wherever the folder goes.
3. Move folders, not files. When you copy work to another machine, copy the whole project folder. Cherry-picking individual files is how image links get separated from the project that references them.
4. Keep the ZIP. Store the original ZIP (and its SHA-256) on the same drive. If a machine’s copy of the folder is ever damaged, you can re-extract a known-good program in seconds.

Shared and Lab Machines

The portable build suits shared computers — a library workstation, a university lab, a scanning room PC — because it asks for no installation and no administrator rights, and it leaves with you when your USB drive does. Two courtesies worth observing on machines that are not yours: keep your scans and projects on your own drive rather than the machine’s disk, and remember that the Visual C++ runtime is a per-machine prerequisite — if the program will not start on a lab PC, that missing runtime (not your project) is the usual reason, and fixing it is a job for whoever administers the machine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need administrator rights to use the portable build?

No. The portable build requires no installation, so you can extract and run it from any folder you can write to, including a USB drive. The only per-machine prerequisite is Microsoft’s Visual C++ Redistributable, which most Windows PCs already have.

What happens to my project when I move it to another computer?

Since v1.1.1, projects use relative paths, so if you move the whole project folder — scans and project file together — the project opens on the new machine with its images intact. Moving only the project file without its images breaks the references.

Can I run two versions of ScanTailor Advanced side by side?

Yes — that is a natural benefit of a portable build. Extract each version to its own folder and run whichever you need. Just remember that releases from v1.2.0 rename the executable to scantailor-advanced, while the v1.1.1 Windows build uses scantailor.exe.