Ever wonder how many times you’ve pressed the shutter release on your camera?  I have. This post is the result of some research you might find useful, or at least interesting. We know we certainly don’t keep all of our digital images so a count of the images in our digital libraries isn’t an accurate assessment of  how voraciously we press the shutter button. Some cameras come with a guarantee of X number of shutter activations so it might be useful to know how far along you are on that scale. Investigating all your camera’s hidden menus probably won’t help. The number you seek is hidden, although not very cleverly so. Some might tell you the count of shutter activations is contained in your images EXIF data. It is and it isn’t depending on what you are using to examine that data. For instance, if you look through the EXIF data connected to your images in Adobe Lightroom you won’t find it. Some might also tell you you must shoot images in RAW format to find this data but that’s not quite the case either. Shutter activation count is contained in RAW EXIF data but also in JPEG EXIF data too, sometimes.

There are several fairly simple methods to find the secretive shutter activation count. Here are three. If you have Adobe Photoshop the simplest method is to open the image in Photoshop then click File and then File Info. Move to the right to Advanced Tab and click it then click the little arrow to the left of Schema look down to “aux:image number”. The second way, just as easy if you use Firefox as a browser, is to install the Firefox add-on called EXIF viewer. Start Firefox, open an image, right click on the image and click “view image EXIF data”. Check the little box that says “Display Maker Note (if available)”. Then scroll down to the Maker note section and look for “shutter count”. Third way: do a Google search for EXIF Viewer. Lots of free ones available. Instructions vary.

That’s all for now.

PP