How to make Remote Assistant Jump Through Loops

I've noticed in a few threads that some people have been trying to increase the size of the display in RA. The easiest solution to this is to use some software such as ACDSee which will watch a directory and load a picure as soon as it lands in the directory. You can resize the ACDSee preview screen to almost the height of your monitor. In the picture I was using ACDSee v3.1 (don't like bloatware) to check the focus of a lens on some boxes almost in realtime. I could have made the preview higher by reducing the thumbnail size or just showing one vertical strip of thumbs.





Before you start you need to save your ACDSee setting because you will be making quite a change to the layout.

Load a photo into browser so that you can see the changes. It's better to use the folder that RA will be dropping into.

The main setting that allows this to work is Tools/Options/Browser/Preview check Automatic if it isn't already checked. Set size to Auto for now... later you can set it to Full if you want to view the actual pixels 1:1 This can also be accessed from View/Preview on the menu.

Now change the layout View/Browser Panes/ uncheck all except status bar and preview area. This should give you an almost full screen capture from RA or the thumnails will be visible as well as above. If the thumbnails aren't visible there should be a bar at the right that you can drag to the left to show the thumbs. Test it by dropping a jpeg into the directory that is being watched it should pop into the preview window.

Save this Layout Scheme as RA Capture.

Fire up RA and set it to drop it's files into the dir. that ACDSee is using. Set to to sequentially number it's files.

RA numbers it's files by adding 1 to the last filename, so if you take a test shot and then delete it. RA will use the same number for the next shot. If you delete some earlier shots RA ignores it and still uses the last highest number remaining.

Load the original Layout Scheme to go back.

If your computer won't let you take more that 1-2 shots try a remote hub such as Belkin, powered at first... if that works try it without the power. Mine works Ok like that and my Toshiba laptop works OK on it's own without a hub.

shim

Edit: Don't forget to make your thumbnails very small.