Lightroom as a DAM Tool and Metadata Stats
Everyone loves stats! I built a giant Lightroom catalogue of all my photos since 2004 — about 20,500 odd. Much to my surprise, it worked superbly well. This is one area in which Lightroom 2 is a vast improvement over version 1 which started slowing down noticeably when my catalogs reached a size of about 10k photos (although I have also upgraded my machine since last I tried that). Having so many photos lets you get a birdseye view of your own shooting habits and equipment. So here is a summary from the metadata view:
Top cameras:
- Pentax K100D - 11,972
- Pentax K10D - 3,636
- Pentax *ist DL - 1,938
- Canon EOS 350D - 1,471
- Fuji FinePix 4700z - 560
- various other point-and-shoots, film scans, edits
Of those, I still have the K10D and the K100D. Although I've had the K10D for about the same time that I had the K100D before, I took all my photos in Namibia and Europe last year with the K100D hence the much higher picture count from with body.
Top Pentax lenses:
- Pentax DA 50-200mm F4-5.6 ED - 6,713
- Pentax DA 16-45mm F4 ED AL - 5,069
- Pentax FA 50mm F1.4 - 2,911
- Pentax DA 18-55mm - 2,204
- various K/M/A lenses - 628
- various others
The 16-45/4 is the lens most likely to be found on the front of my K10D these days but I've shot all the fashion weeks with the 50-200 for lack of a better lens and those generate tons of shots in a short space time. This accounts for the puny 50-200 having so many pics against it! Otherwise the 16-45 is my favourite lens - great optical quality, light, and almost-but-not-quite wide enough standard zoom (equivalent to 24-70mm in 35mm terms).
*DAM = Digital Asset Management, i.e. handling very large media libraries.