How to find the shutter count on your camera!!!


I recently sold my D200 on Ebay and replaced it with a new D90. This is going to have to become an annual (or bi-annual) event. Digital cameras are not meant to last ten or more years like film cameras. Isn't it crazy, I still have my first N90 that I purchased 15 years ago, but I know my D90 is not going to be in my hands 3 years from now?

While selling my camera, I came across a difficult question someone had about my camera. "What's the shutter count?"

I have absolutely no idea how many times the number counter on the camera rotated past that 9999 count in the file name. So how can I give an honest answer?

Someone recommended a couple programs. One of them is very popular, but only works on PC ( opanda.com ). You have to buy the program too which doesn't make sense for me since I only need to know the number ONCE... When I sell it. There is a program for mac ( http://homepage.mac.com/aozer/EV/index.html )
 but it only reads a jpg file and I wasn't able to get it to work.

Then I came across this website that works very nicely. You select an image, it reads it and you can see your shutter count right then and there.

 http://regex.info/exif.cgi 

BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE!!!

If you are a good metadata person and keep all your info in the image and someone wants to find who took the shot online, they can paste the html link and this program will gather all the available info from the image. Very cool.

If you aren't concerned with this crap, you better be. Orphan works bill is coming and the last thing you need is someone doing a 'resonable search' for who took your shot, not finding your info and calling it an orphan and therefore theirs.

Read more about this stuff at www.asmp.org.
AA

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