The life expectancy of a DSLR camera is usually measured in shutter actuations. For example, Nikon D5000 is good for about 100,000 shutter clicks. That doesn’t mean that your camera dies the day it exceeds its shutter actuation limit, but the shutter count provides a good indication of the camera’s condition.
While none of the major camera manufacturers provide an in-camera feature for checking the shutter count value, you can use digiKam to do that. Double-click on the most recent photo taken with your camera to open it in the preview pane. Press the Metadata button on the right side of the main window to show the Metadata sidebar. Click on the Makernote tab, and press the Full List button. Scroll down the list to locate the Shutter Count entry and its value. Keep in mind, though, that Shutter Count is a proprietary tag, so it may or may not be supported by your specific camera model.
By the way, if you are curious about the real life expectancy of your particular camera model, check the excellent Camera Shutter Life Expectancy Database resource.
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This doesn’t work with Canon EOS DSLR cameras as they don’t store this information in the image. I’ve confirmed this with my 450D and I believe it is the same on other Canon’s but I may be wrong.
You can however use gphoto2 to pull this directly out of the camera using:
gphoto2 –get-config /main/status/shuttercounter
Again, this works on the 450D, not tested on anything else.
By the way, mine is on 43525!
My Olympus E-510 does not seem to expose this property as I am unable to locate it in digikam as explained above.
If digiKam doesn’t do the trick, you might want to try exiftool:
exiftool -ShutterCount path/to/photo
On Ubuntu, you can install exiftool using the following command:
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl
I can confirm above for the Canon EOS 1000D. The information is not stored in the image.
However, I didn’t try to pull the information directly from the camera, so I can neither confirm or deny that.
I sometimes get the impression that the DigiKam developers have never seen a Canon DSLR. 😉
Most of the up-to-date support in Exiv2 is for Nikon metadata. Exiftool, used separately from DigiKam, is a lot better for Canon metadata.
but exiv2 is MUCH faster for processing many files. I use both as needed.
Some Canon’s professional DSLRs report the shutter count in the Exif data, but none of their consumer cameras do. The alternative I use is to to set sequential file numbering from day one. The file number is then the rough equivalent of the shutter count (i.e., it does not count opening the shutter for live view, sensor cleaning, or playing with the camera with no card inserted). Unfortunately, the last time I checked, Exiv2/DigiKam could not get the “FileNumber” tag for an EOS 40D or 50D. Exiftool can do it, though.
It would be nice if this would be a feature in digikam, maybe integrated with the website you linked to.
Unfortunately there is no way to check shutter count in Sony A100 (and I think other Alfa models neither).
Unfortunately, on my Pentax K200D the shutter value says 240 37 234 116, which isn’t the real number 😉
This worked neither for my Pentax K100D Super nor for the K-7 with digiKam version 2.5.0 working on RAW (PEF) files. The displayed value always made no sense, they probably need some decoding first. Exiftool however als works on PEF files and gets a number that looks correct.