What your Metadata says about you?
Using Metadata To Analyze Your Lens Usage.

Contrary to the title, this is not going to be another scare piece about how your camera’s metadata is a tool created by the some evil government organization out to track your every move through social media, or how .xif files can be used by Joe Hacker or Pete the Pedophile for nefarious purposes.  There are plenty of articles out there already in the blog sphere, and mainstream media.   I am going to show you one example on how metadata, can be a very useful tool for planning your next shoot.  Whether it be your next assignment or vacation.   If you are like me who has been bitten by lens addiction, you have found your camera bag growing heavier by the month.  Is there a way to find out which lens I use the most, so I can make an educated assumption of which equipment to take with me or leave at home?

Yes there is!! if you  use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to organize your photos you can use the filter bar in the Library module to sort  by a multitude of categories, such as camera, lens, focal length etc.  You can then just look at the breakdown and make a quick guess of the gear you use the most or take it one step further and plug that data into a spreadsheet and come up with some pretty nifty graphs.

Let’s go ahead and go into Lightroom. Once  our library has loaded, go to the Library Module  and select Filter by Metadata > Enable Metadata Filter.  You will see the following screen come up with the default filters selected.

By Default, Lightroom will filter by Date, Camera, Lens, and Label.  I have set my filters to add Aperture, and removed labels.  As you can see in 2010, I supposedly had 2 cameras (I think when I converted my library from Apple’s Aperture to Lightroom some of the metadata became corrupted.) I am pretty sure 6 of the 7 pictures were shot with the Canon30D and the 70-200 F4.0L.

I took 506 pictures in 2010 (This does seem a bit low, but we won’t argue).
I owned 2 lenses, and surprisingly enough took an equal amount of photos with either lens. F4.0 seemed to be my most frequent used aperture with 109 pictures.
Let’s jump to 2015, where the data is much different.

Ignore the Canon 7D, as this is the camera Mi Jung uses, and I imported her photos from our river cruise. We are only interested in the pictures that I have taken.

This year I have taken 8089 photos, it looks like the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM lens is the clear winner, with the EF50mm f/1.2L USM being the runner up. The EF16-35mm f/2.8L has gotten a surprising amount of use, as I bought this lens late in 2014.  I am surprised that I have used the Tameron 150-600mm/f5-6.3 as much as I have been, because it is pretty much a specialty lens, and pretty heavy to boot.  It looks like f4 has won out again this year as being my most used aperture, which I think has something to do with it being my most used lens (70-200mm f4L) wide open aperture.

Now that we have a way to get the numbers, let’s go ahead and put them into Excel so we can actually start analyzing the data.

Here I have entered the data obtained by Lightroom into an Excel spreadsheet sorted by year, I have highlighted the year the lenses were purchased in blue.

If I highlight the spreadsheet, then go to Insert > Insert Collum Or Bar Chart, or Instert Pie or Doughnut Chart.  I can get good graphical representations of my lens usage

Here is bar chart displaying the number of pictures taken each year sorted by lens.

We can change the sorting to display number of pictures by lens sorted by year by clicking on the chart and selecting the chart filters icon.

Then click Select Data

Click Switch Row/Colum

Click Ok

You will now see the chart is displaying the amont of pictures taken each year sorted by lens.

Conclusion –

If I was planning a trip and packing light, The lenses that I would take would most likely be the EF 70-200mm f/4L, EF-50mm/f1.2.  It would then be a judgment call if I would take either the EF 35mm/f1.4 or the EF 16-35mm/f2.8.   Most likely I would take the 16-35mm, unless I knew I would be doing a lot of shooting in area’s that were not well lit.

You now have a pretty good idea how useful your camera’s meta data can be, and a way that can make itself useful to you.  You can break these numbers down even further if you keyword your photos in your library.  For instance, if I populated the category field, I could further break these numbers down by what lens’s I use most often at “The Beach”, or on “Cruises”, or at a “Wedding”  How you sort your photos is a personal preference, how you use Lightroom is up to the you.  Keep active, and keep shooting!