Once you have shot all your photos, download them inside a new folder on your PC or Mac. Now launch the application called “Homer”, which Windows users should find on their Desktop (it is in fact a shortcut), while Mac users find on the Dock. From here you have to select the input folder containing the images to be renamed and rotated.

Homer for Mac displays a dialog window from where you can browse your hard drive and find the wanted folders, whereas the Windows version immediately starts within the Command Prompt, and asks you to enter the “path” to the input folder (e.g., "C:\Documents and Settings\cosimolupo\Desktop\input-folder"). But there’s no need to be scared of the black window. Both Windows and Mac users can “drag and drop” the folder onto the icon of the Homer script, which will then regard it as input for processing. And Windows users don’t need to digit the full path, but can also drag and drop the directory containing the images on the Command Prompt window itself. The OS will then take care of inserting the right path (enclosed in quotes if containing spaces).

After you have selected the input folder, you will be prompted to choose among four alternative options. The first two allows to rename and rotate the images depending on whether you started scanning from the right- or from the left-hand pages; the third option is for renaming the images without rotating them (a quicker option for those who prefer using Scan Tailor to rotate the images after that); finally, the fourth option is for running the text recognition software (Tesseract OCR) and for converting the files into a single, searchable PDF. Between the first three options for reordering, and the fourth one for converting to PDF, stands a middle step, which is perhaps the most important one and which cannot be included in the Homer script, not only because it is too complex but also because there is already a full-blown application for that, which happens to be free too: the middle step consist in “post-processing” the images, and the application is called Scan Tailor, available on all operating systems.

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