Here’s a surprisingly cool online tool I discovered recently. It reads your Lightroom catalog and enables you to view all sorts of cool analytical data, drilling down into the minutiae of your photography habits. It’s called PhotoStats and it operates entirely in your browser locally – nothing gets uploaded anywhere. This is just as well because my main Lightroom catalog is over 5Gb big.
On the left of the screen are various sections for viewing statistical data based on your gear and shooting habits. The main landing screen – the overview, shows your shooting frequency over specific time frames and simple stats on your favourite camers, lens, focal lengths,and activity.
The comparison mode is interesting because you can see how things have changed over time. The main takeaway for me is that I’ve been shooting a lot less than I have in previous years and doing so at more predictable times of the day.
Once it’s loaded, you can bounce between different views and start spotting patterns you’d never notice just flicking through Lightroom. Things like:
which focal lengths you think you use vs the ones you actually use
how your shooting habits shift across seasons or years
which cameras genuinely earned their keep and which ones mostly sat there looking expensive
According to my stats, I peaked in 2016, but coming out of the pandemic in 2020 was also a very active period in my photography which, I guess isn’t that surprising.
To use this free service simply go to the website, browse to your Lightroom catalog and let it rip. It’s not uploading anything anywhere because it’s just an app that happens to run inside your browser, so feel free to explore your entire archive without worrying that your raws are being siphoned off to train someone else’s AI or quietly hoarded on a server farm.
Also published in RAW & Unfiltered on Substack.
