Knowing the shutter actuation count of your camera (or a 2nd-hand camera your buying) is important if you want to know the “age” of the camera based on how much it has been used. The higher the number, the more pictures it has taken in its lifetime.
Recently, I was interested to know the shutter actuation count on my Nikon D200. I found that is was relatively easy and straightforward to do in Linux. I use Ubuntu in my setup but it should be quite similar with other Linux distributions as well.
First, open up Terminal and install exiftool by typing/copy-pasting the following command:
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl
You can also open up Ubuntu Software Center, search for exiftool, and installing the libimage-exiftool-perl package.
Next, take a picture and copy it to your computer and navigate to it in Terminal, like so:
cd Pictures/20111009
Lastly, use exiftool to bring up the EXIF info of your picture.
exiftool DSCN_4738.NEF
This will show you A LOT of information. Since we’re only interested in the shutter count, use this instead:
exiftool DSCN_4738.NEF | grep “Shutter Count”
And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this post and may it find you when you need it!
Enjoy!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Well I found your post helpful, but sadly apple has done some annioyng things with iOS6 (besides the obviously horrible map application), namely they have withdrawn all the location data from exif information in the camera role. I did a dump with exiftool as you suggest and the result was an extremely watered down version of what you post here. ImageSize, FocalLengthShutterSpeed, Aperture, ISO, WhiteBalance and thats about it . still looking for a way to get lat/lon from my photos cheers.