Dear John T. Haller and Gord Caswell,
A request was made to make digiKam portable many years ago by photomacro. That request was rejected due to huge install of KDE framework by digiKam:
https://portableapps.com/node/28757
Could you please take a second look and let us know if that is still the case with latest release of digiKam?
https://download.kde.org/stable/digikam
Thank you for all your hard work in making portable apps.