Lightroom metadata review of the year

Hi, my name's Joe Houghton and I'm a photography trainer based out of Dublin in Ireland. And in today's short video, I want to show you how you can review your photographic year using some of the metadata, the, the hidden information that Lightroom stores about all your photos. So let's have a look inside Lightroom and see what your photos and the information that's stored with them can tell you about your habits during the past photographic year. So here we are in Lightroom, and today I just want to show you a few tips and tricks around using the metadata in your photos to find out perhaps how you've done during the last year. I tend to do this in December, have a look back through my past year's photos and, you know, pull out some statistics about how many shots I've taken and what cameras and lenses have been most popular that I've used and that kind of stuff. So over in the left-hand side, we're in the library view at the moment, so in the left-hand pane you can see the folders section here. So I store all my folders on my MacBook Pro in Dropbox so that they're automatically backed up, and I have a pictures folder and then a year folder. So here's 2018, and then I have month and the, the days of each shoot that I, that I do. And as you can see, I've set up a 2019 folder there with a January subfolder, but there's obviously nothing in it yet because it's still the 29th of December. So immediately on this side, I can see that under 2018 for my December photos, and they're, they're all in here, I've taken 2,135 shots. in December, and each of the days that I took shots, we can see, are here with the number of shots that I took. So that makes it very easy to see the number of shots. Now, because my hard drive is of limited size, I generally only keep the last month's shots on my local hard drive. So if we scroll down a little, we can see that I have a 4 terabyte Western Digital Elements hard drive here, and I've got pretty much all my photos going back to 2000 on here. And you can see each year how many shots I took, and the number tends to be going up certainly over the last number of years here. So for 2018, January through November, I've taken 11,900, and then the December shots are another, what, couple of thousand? I think it was 2,135 on top of that, so about, what, 14,000 shots in total that I took during the year of 2018. Now if you want to delve a little bit more deeper into information about the stuff that you've done during the year, we go up to the top row here in the library, the library filter row, and let's just click on the metadata row here. So by default we have date, camera, lens, and label, and if you pull down this little bar, you see once the, the double-headed arrow appears, you can pull this bar down and you can see more stuff. So depending on where you are on the left-hand side, this metadata will show up. So at the moment I'm just showing the metadata for the highlighted folder, which was the 8th of December. So let me go up to— well, what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to go all the way to the top to my whole catalogue and and show all photographs. Okay, so this is showing all 453,000 photographs across all the different hard drives that I've got photos on that are all stored in this catalogue. So some of those hard drives are not connected. You can see this 2 terabyte Elements and this, this other 2 terabyte Elements, but this is all my photos. But now if I click on metadata Okay, it will have a good think about that, and now what it's going to do is go through my whole catalogue and show me all the years and all the cameras and all the lenses that have ever been used. So I can actually go down under the dates folder here, and I'll just close everything down, and I just want it to show me 2018. So there's all my shots taken in 2018, and it's telling me that in my catalogue as a whole I have 26,649 shots registered against that year. Over here in camera, we can see all the cameras that I've used. So if I drag this down a bit further until we've got all these things shown— there we are— So 15,000 of the shots that I took this year have been taken with my Nikon D810. 4,900 have been taken with the D750, 238 with a Nikon D500, okay, and as you can see my most recent purchase a couple of months ago was a little Fuji X100S. And in 2 months of shooting I've shot 5,600 shots with the X100S. If we go back and select all the cameras again, we can now see all the different lenses that were used across all those cameras. So if I just wanted to see, well, what lenses did I use with my 810, if I click on this, so now we've got 2018 Nikon D810, and then here's all the different lenses that I shot using the Nikon D810. And this gives you quite an interesting insight if you, if you've got access to a number of lenses. Which ones are you using the most and which ones are you shooting with the most? So out of those 15,000 shots that I shot on the Nikon D810, we can see that my 16-35 I shot 4,035 shots, and as I click on that lens, the photos in the bottom of the screen are filtered by these 3 selections. So if I want to see my longer shots, say my 70-200 shots, then there's 1,900 of them, and then these are the shots down here that were taken with my 70-200. So it's quite quick to to see where these different lenses have been used. And what we might do is say, well, okay, looking at that, in the past year the 18-55mm kind of kit lens was only used 62 times. So if you're thinking about perhaps getting rid of a lens, or, you know, selling a lens, or passing a lens on, or whatever, then maybe that would be a prime candidate. Yeah, my 70-300mm was only used for 111 shots out of my 15,000, so, you know, I might want to think about, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to get rid of some kit or lighten up the load, then maybe that one would be one to get rid of. The nifty 50 didn't get many outings obviously this year, only 379 shots. And the 28-80mm, which was actually a lens that I borrowed for a couple of weeks, just really for a couple of sunrise shoots in South Africa, 394 shots. So it's very quick and easy to see all the different lenses. But you're not limited to just these 4 default columns on metadata. So at the right-hand corner, the right-hand edge of each of these columns, you can see this little dropdown here where my mouse pointer is pointing, and we can add a column or we can change by clicking on the lens double arrow here. We can change what this particular column shows us. So we're not using Label at the moment, so let's change Label And let's say, okay, well, let's have a look at my average aperture, all the different apertures that I used across the year. Okay, so with all my lenses on the Nikon D810 for this year, these are the number of shots that I shot at each different aperture. So you can see f/36, f/32, f/22, So we're starting to get into the higher numbers here, but by far the majority of my shots were taken at f/2.8, and then following that, f/6.3. And knowing the lenses that I've got, f/2.8, that's probably my 70-200mm, which is a f/2.8. The 24-70 is also a f/2.8, and I would very often use both of those lenses wide open, so that's where these numbers are probably coming from. Then the 16-35mm f/4, we're seeing 635 at f/4, 637 at f/4, and then, you know, another 2400 or so, kind of in this range. So f/4 through to f/8, that's, that's the kind of fairly common range that I would be shooting that wide angle at, maybe up to f/16. So that's what we're seeing, we're seeing this, this good range of shots here, and a lot of that will be coming off that 16-35. that I was shooting. I don't tend to go much above f/16 a lot of the time because then you start to get, you know, diffraction with the lenses and stuff like that. So quite interesting to see. So that's aperture, and if we do that for all the cameras, then the numbers over here are going to change once it's had a chance to think about things. There we are, so now with all 29,000 shots for all these cameras and all the lenses, then again f/2.8 is still the most popular, 4,000, but then f/4, f/5.6, yeah, those are the most popular, and then f/8. So it starts to give you perhaps an insight into your preferred shooting styles when you're shooting different shots and different lenses, and it's very easy to drill down and say, okay, well, you know, if I was just shooting the 16-35mm f/4, just show me what my preferred apertures are on here. And you see it's pretty much across the board. I'm not really shooting specifically at any particular aperture between f/16 and f/4, so it kind of is— obviously I'm using that lens almost to its full potential. 24-70mm, as expected, most of the time I'm going to be shooting that wide open because that tends to be a lens that I would use quite a lot for, you know, groups, small group portrait work, that kind of stuff, indoor work. Where I'm probably looking for some depth of field separation of the subjects from the backgrounds. What else can we see in, in our metadata? We can have a look at our focal length. So across all the lenses and all the cameras for the year, we have a look at focal length. Okay, so what do I like shooting? So we've got 2,200 of my 29,000 are shot, you know, wide angle. These ones I guess are the iPhone probably, but if we're going up to the SLR cameras then 23mm, 5,600, so that's obviously, you know, 23-24mm is a focal length that I'm obviously shooting a lot. And then 70, that would be the wide end of the 70-200 lens probably. 105, I've got the 105mm macro lens, so that's probably when I was using that. And then my Tamron 150-600mm lens, um, showing down here 5,000-odd shots, of which 3,700 were taken out at 600mm, which is fair enough. You know, you buy one of those big long lenses, most of the time you're going to use it out at the long end of of the shoot, especially if, you know, I was shooting a lot in South Africa this year with that lens. I got a chance to use the 850. One of my friends in South Africa had an 850mm and he let me shoot that on his D850, so that's where those numbers are coming from. So focal length, you can have a look at that. How many times am I shooting flash? So we give it a chance to, to have a think because again it's going through a lot of shots. So didn't do a lot of flash work this year. 29,000 shots, did fire 700, didn't fire 28,000. So most of my work has been not using flash this year. We can— if you have GPS on your camera and you're generally storing GPS or whatever, then you can obviously, you know, have a look by city or by location or country. But as you see, most of mine don't— I haven't got GPS on my camera, so most of these are coming in as unknown country. Aspect ratio, you can see how many of your shots are portrait or landscape or square. So it shows me that, you know, 20,000 of my shots are shot in landscape mode, which is this kind of an image, whereas portrait mode, the taller images 10,000, so twice as many landscape, and then I've processed some out to square, so you can see the square ones there. So that was just a quick introduction, if you like, to using the library filter metadata to interrogate the data that you have about All the shots that you've taken across the year.