Tools required by Pictools

Cygwin - Pictools is Cygwin based, but can probably be made to work with native Unix distributions. Cygwin setup requires you to choose among the hundreds of available packages; for pictools you need at least all of the base category and the individual components dos2unix, gcc-g++, ghostscript, ghostscript-fonts-std, ImageMagick, inetutils, make, openssh, sqlite3, sqliteman, and tcsh. For myself, I also select gdb, less, and ed. With all these loaded, cygwin has 13,274 files and occupies around 570MB. As its final act, cygwin offers to put a Cygwin terminal shortcut  on your desktop. Check yes.

The server needs to support Unix commands and sqlite3.

Terminal Windows

Clicking the Cygwin terminal shortcut opens a type-script window where you issue Linux commands and see the results. Learn to use cd, ls, mv, and rm to manage your local files. You will use make to install Pictools from your source machine to the server. You will use ssh to connect to the server and manage files there.

Looking at the properties of the shortcut, the target shows that clicking the icon runs the command

C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico -

This default chooses the windows home directory and omits cygwin command directories from the PATH. For best results, I recommend replacing the final dash with a title and a shell: (my choice is the tcsh shell; many others prefer bash),

-t local-tcsh /bin/tcsh.exe -l

After opening a terminal via a shortcut, you can adjust the window properties by right-clicking the title bar and clicking "Option...".  These changes can be made permanent to the shortcut. My taste is for white text on blue with a larger-than-default font. This choice clashes with ls, which prints directory names in blue, rendering them invisible. For this reason and other adaptations I add a $HOME/.login file. See login.php.

A shell usually sets variable HOME to /home/$USER, where USER is the Windows value USERNAME. However the shell will honor a value for HOME that you set in the windows environment variables. The "Start in" value in a windows shortcut to a shell has no effect. Perservely, some applications, especially ssh-keygen, ignore the value of HOME, instead using /home/$USER.

( It cost me a day to figure out how to set HOME in a Windows shortcut, so here it is. If you want to open a tcsh shell and have it believe that HOME is directory cottage, you need two files in cottage. One is an ordinary .login file as above. The other is starttcsh.csh like this

setenv HOME cottage
exec /bin/tcsh -l

This is called from a shortcut with a target that invokes mintty as above and replaces the final dash with

-t local-csh /bin/tcsh -l cottage/starttcsh.csh

)

Other Tools

Alternatives to these will probably work without modification of their code or Pictools.

FireFox		Of course. You should test the site under multiple browsers; in addition to Firefox, I check with Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
Picasa		For managing the photograph collection. All my original pictures are in one directory tree. After selecting those to display, I export them to another tree. This latter tree is the value of picturesroot in /Pictools.properties. (Picasa is obsolete, but still works. The only requiement for pictures management is to be able to export chosen pictures in a separate directory.) Google no longer offers a download of Picasa, so I recently had to decide which was the "real" Picasso. The best available version for windows is 3.9.141.259 at exactly 13677800 bytes (according to "ls -l"). to avoid your doing the research, my downloaded Picasa is here.
DreamWeaver		Web page editor.
WinMerge		DreamWeaver needs a file comparison utility; WinMerge does well.
Filezilla		For the occasional file transfer not handled by the web page editor
Emacs		Essential for keyboard macros and query-replace of newlines and tabs. I am still using version "GNU Emacs 24.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.2.9200)" I prefer the windows distribution because it uses native Windows windows. Since I usually want to edit a string instead of a file, I set the option initial-buffer-choice to "Lisp scratch buffer". In the .emacs file this is written (custom-set-variables '(initial-buffer-choice t))
Windows 8.1		Sigh. Once-upon-a-time, IBM was the evil empire. Then Microsoft. Now Google. Next Amazon.
	Windows Explorer	Really the only way to get at your files. But grep is better for finding strings in files.
	Wordpad	Great little editor. Does nothing unexpected. It is the only tool for me when writing a first draft. Far superior to notepad and MS Word. (It is lobotimized on windows 10, Stick with 8.1)
	"Prt Scr"	Keyboard key. Type it to save the screen image to the clipboard.
	Paint	After Prt Scr, open paint. Then paste the clipboard and crop as needed. Save in .png format to avoid .jpg's propensity to smear text and .gif's penchant for changing colors.
MicroSoft Office		or the free alternative: openOffice
	Excel	Great for structured calculation. Also great for generating code.
	PowerPoint	For creating diagrams with drawing tools and clipart.

I also use NetBeans and Java for creating Java applications.