If you’ve ever wanted to know just how many photos you typically shoot in August, or how often you’re really using each lens in your bag, or what seems to be your go-to aperture, there is a free web-based tool that can show you. With Lightroom Dashboard, you simply drag and drop your Lightroom catalog into the browser and get back all sorts of analytical data including those just mentioned plus more.
Developed by Cheyne Wallace, a software engineer living in San Francisco, the tool was built as a side project and released for free to give back to the photography community. Wallace states he wanted to better understand his photography practices as well as possibly justify purchasing f/2.8 lenses.
After you drop in your own Lightroom catalog (according to the website your file is not uploaded, but rather only read in the browser) you can begin to scroll through some charts and graphs that may surprise you with their results. What you choose to do with this information is up to you, but it’s an interesting way to see what all of your hard work looks like when you strip away the images themselves.
Wallace has already released a couple updates to Lightroom Dashboard since its debut, and if you’d like to keep up with the development there is a Twitter account you can follow. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you donated a little something either.
Going to give this a try. Looks awesome!
"you simply drag and drop your Lightroom catalog into the browser" ... I am not sure if I should do that with a 3GB file. :D
If you go to the site you'll see he recently made a large catalog converter tool: https://www.lightroomdashboard.com/converter
Where's the chart on the amount of coffee consumed by editing?
Highly questionable results. After analyzing my catalog is indicates my 70-200 mm lens is most used. I've hardly ever used it, 90% of my photos are with my 14-24mm. I think I've actually taken maybe 200 frames with that lens of the 36,000 in my catalog.
Exposure Plot has been doing this sort of thing for a few years; useful for non-Lightroom users. http://www.vandel.nl/exposureplot.html