How to create exif statistics for your photos

If you have Adobe Bridge, you can display statistics such as how many times you used a certain focal length or which ISO speeds you use the most.

But what if you wanted to use this information in another application or post it on your blog? Unfortunately, Bridge doesn’t let you export that information (or at least I couldn’t figure out how), and not everyone can afford Photoshop with Bridge anyway.

ExifTool to the rescue

Don’t worry there are free tools to achieve the same or even better:

ExifTool by Phil Harvey is the most powerful tool to read, edit and write any metadata of your photos. It can extract even more information from your exif data than Adobe Bridge itself, especially for proprietary RAW formats such as Nikon’s NEF.

Together with the Exif Stats Utility it allows you to extract any technical information stored in your photos you can think of, e.g. which lens or exposure time you used the most.

Installation on Windows 7

1. Download and install ActivePearl. Allow the MSI installer to add perl to your path settings.
2. Download the perl version of ExifTool and extract it to a folder of your choice, e.g. C:Program Files (x86)ToolsExifTool
3. Download Exif Stats and extract it to any folder, e.g. C:Program Files (x86)ToolsExif Stats
4. Run exifstats.exe
5. You can edit the batch file exiftool.bat to define which tags you want to analyze. Have a look at the command line parameters for exiftool
6. Copy-Paste the content from the Output to the application of your choice such as LibreOffice Calc to create nice graphs

Lens and ISO statistics from a photo trip to Finland