While that is happeing, start a remote desktop connection to distress via the left mouse cursor menu on the root window. This might take a while to start.

Once the photos have been read in from the camera, change to the parent directory of the directory where the images are, and prepare the images for Microsoft:

fordxo puts the files in the directory P:\00-yvonne, which Microsoft can access easily. The -d tells it to first remove what was already there, so don't use this if you have stuff in there that you haven't got out yet with fromdxo (see below).

fordxo moves the raw files to a directory /Photos/00-yvonne so that I can just select all rather than mess around with a mouse in Microsoft style. /Photos is mounted as a CIFS file system.

You can check that the images are there if you want with:

This doesn't make any difference to the processing.

If distress still hasn't come to life, try again. This time it should be fast.

The background here is that distress, running Microsoft “Windows” 7, takes so long to come out of hibernation that I need to retry. But this should no longer happen, since the connection retries automatically.

On distress, start DxO Optics “Pro”. Select ORGANIZE at top left, and then the directory Computer/Photos/00-yvonne:

Image title: DxO 1 Dimensions: 247 x 383, 8 kB Dimensions of original: 247 x 383, 8 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Monday, 28 December 2015: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

If no images show, or the wrong images show, press the F5 key and wait a while. If still nothing happens, panic.

Select CUSTOMIZE to the right of ORGANIZE and click on an image that you want to process in the display at the bottom of the screen. The image will be highlighted at the bottom, and the image will appear at top left and in the middle of the display:

You can select a number of tools to modify the shape of the image:

Image title: DxO 2 detail Dimensions: 199 x 89, 10 kB Dimensions of original: 199 x 89, 10 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Friday, 25 April 2014: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

From left to right, these are crop, dust removal, straighten horizon, force lines to be parallel, force a box, and white balance chooser.

After preparing the image, press the Export to disk area at bottom right and then press Export . The image will be processed.

When you're done, go back to your xterm and enter:

fromdxo takes the processed images and puts them back where they belong, updating EXIF information as it goes. The contacts target creates a web page with “contact prints”, into which you can enter descriptive names, as shown below. The messages are normal.

With a web browser, go to /yvonne/localtmp/contacts and select the date. You should get:

At the top, enter a description of the day's photos. Under each image, enter a name (without spaces). If the name ends in, say, -1, you can enter a comma in the next field and it will automatically be replaced by the same name with -2, etc. You can also enter a !, in which case the names will count up until the end of the page or the next place where you have entered text.

When you're finished, press Submit and go back to the xterm. There enter:

At the end it will say something like:

The two lines in the middle are harmless information messages. Note the number in the first line. You'll need it in the next step.

Go back to distress to despair and at the bottom select Ashampo Photo Optimizer. It's intended for illiterate people, so all you see is the image , unless it's already started, in which case it tries to say its name (but fails): .

You should see:

Image title: Ashampoo detail Dimensions: 233 x 232, 8 kB Dimensions of original: 233 x 232, 8 kB Display this image: thumbnail    hidden   alone on page Display all images on this page as: thumbnails    this size Show for Tuesday, 29 December 2015: thumbnails    small images    diary entry

This should be on distress, but Ashampoo has completely broken itself there.

Select Bloody-stupid-ashampoo (below Ashampoo-yvonne) and wait until no images are displayed. Then select Ashampoo-yvonne and wait until the number of images displayed matches what you noted in the previous step (about 1 per second). Press Ctrl-A to select all images and Ctrl-left button to deselect or reselect individual images. Then click on “Auto Optimize” and answer Yes to the question as to whether you want to Auto Optimize. Expect to optimize about 1.5 images per second.

When Ashampoo has finally finished, go back to the xterm, which will still be saying:

Press Return and wait until it finishes. Then go back to the contacts web page and select “Optimization Comparison”. The image on the left of each line is the unoptimized version, the image on the right the optimized version. Run the cursor over the left image to see the difference. If any of the optimized versions are not OK, ask for help.

Enter:

This makes the web page and associated files. When it's done, you can look at the page with a browser.

These targets create a directory hierarchy including three different sizes of each image, along with information to generate a web page to display them.

When you're happy, put the images on the external web server: