Adobe Lightroom is commonly used nowadays from many photographers to edit and post process digital images. It’s a very useful and powerful application on a more affordable price than Adobe Photoshop which undoubtedly is Adobe’s crown jewel for digital image editing. Lightroom also provides digital image files management along with the editing, as well printing and publishing capabilities which makes it very popular choice among both hobbyists and professional photographers.

Lightroom stores metadata about all digital files imported into its catalogs but so far doesn’t offer any analytics of the metadata. Questions like, what is the most frequent used focal length by a photographers in a certain catalog or time period? Or how many images have been processed with a certain noise or sharpness settings? Also no visualization of these metrics is currently provided by Lightroom.

I found a software application which can easily answer these and many more questions: Lightroom Analytics

Once Lightroom catalog is exported and imported into Lightroom Analytics application, different metrics and pie charts are created to reveal the details from the metadata. Why this is important one might ask?

Related: New DSLR and Lenses Are Not Enough

For example: If you bought an expensive 400mm L telephoto lens after seeing beautiful images of birds in flight but your Lightroom metadata shows you only have 5 or 10 images taken with this lens last year, isn’t time to put this lens for sale and pick another lens which would better serve the current needs? Or if one finds most frequently to use f/4 and higher, does he still needs the expensive f/1.2 or f/1.4 lenses in his back?

Of course, this application doesn’t provide all answers or can be a definitive guidance on which lens or camera settings one should keep or use but offers good insights into the camera settings, post-processing settings and lenses used in the past.

Conclusion:

Analyzing your Lightroom catalogs can reveal useful information about the usage pattern of the lenses, focal lengths and apertures you have been using. As a wedding or portrait photographer, this is a valuable information to understand which lenses you most frequently use, as what focal length and aperture. You can make a decisions based on this information by utilizing the information from the Lightroom Analytics. If you are looking to learn about what mistakes to avoid as a photographer, consider reading my other guide: Top 10 Mistakes Every Professional Photographer Should Avoid

Think differently, agree or disagree? Drop me a line or comment below.

About the Author:

Trifon Anguelov Photography is a Premiere Bay Area Wedding Photographer in Mountain View, CA. Many clients in the entire San Francisco Bay Area have entrusted us with capturing their wedding days. To learn more about the wedding photography services we offer and book a wedding or portrait appointment, visit our Wedding and Portrait Photography Site