Hi Jeffrey,

Thank you for making available these great Lightroom plugins.

I was just thinking there are a couple of things that could make the Data Plot plugin even more useful IMHO:

1. Focal length is logarithmic in question – in your diagram above, the 20mm range between 14 and 31mm range is far more vast than the 492-510mm range at the other extreme, in terms of look. I suggest the scale should be logarithmic – between 7 and 20mm (35mm equiv f.l.) each range on the chart should probably be no more than 1mm, whereas at the other extreme (above 400 mm) it can be as much as 50 or 100mm.

2. Your tool takes data and turn it into information. It’d be great if it went a step further to turn it into answers. So what are the questions? I can think of:
– Which focal lengths and apertures are associated with my best rated shots?
– Which focal lengths and apertures am I using most often?
– Which lenses can I do without?
– Which lenses produce the most shots I reject?

Regards

Alex Karasev

Thanks for another great plugin.

Using this in combination with built in LR filters really helps me understand which lenses produce the most pleasing shots.

Hello,

I’m triing out your data-plot plugin but when I check my Panasonic FZ30 pictures I see in the dropdown more than 1 entry for the FZ30 with different crop factors (4,9 – 5 – 5,1 – 7,5).

The FZ30 has a lens of 7,4-88,8 mm wich is equivalent to 35-420 mm so the cropfactor is 4,73 (4,729729729729… to be more precise)

Now you can choose a lower resolution where the FZ30 only uses the center of the sensor and so seems to have a bigger cropfactor but that is in reality only a crop of the bigger picture so (in my opinion) nothing to use in your calculations.

You say you use a database of camera’s to calculate the 35mm equivalent but I suppose that it is buildin the plugin and that the user has no acces to it to add/remove entries?

Many thanks in advance,

If it were using only part of the sensor for the smaller images, it would be a bigger crop, but it’s downsizing from the full sensor to create the smaller image, and hence the crop factor is the same, but gets calculated incorrectly, which is the real problem you’re reporting. The problem is that the plugin can’t tell the difference between an image that’s been cropped, and an image that’s just smaller out of camera. I suppose it makes sense to assume it’s smaller out of camera and let it be wrong if it’s been cropped before loading into LR… I’ll look to see whether I can do that. —Jeffrey

This is a great “self-awareness” tool.

A terrific adjunct would be a similar plot of orientation (ie, vertical/portrait, horizontal/landscape, square)!

Unfortunately the current version does not know my Canon EOS 60D with crop-factor 1.6. Is it possible to add this camera to the database?

Thanks and greetings from Germany, keep up your great work,
Christian

Oops, I pushed out a version with this three months ago, but neglected to let you know, sorry. It’s there now. —Jeffrey

Hmm, I thought I give this plug-in a go…

It works!

… but …

It turns out it processes the photos in the grid, and throws an error: “no photos had 35mm-equiv focal-length data” … when the images are shot with a Canon 60D 🙂

Any information you need to add this camera to your crop table?

Cheers, Max — Brisbane, Australia

Just pushed a new version that should handle your 60D shots. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I’ve just used Data Plot for the first time….very interesting (focal length) results for me. Thank You.

However, now I can’t turn it off! There are no Red/Amber/Green buttons in the top l/h corner and clicking on the main LR body just emits an audible ‘ping’ (as does pressing the ESC button)

Please help!

Regards

Adam Lewis

Yikes, that’s not good. There should be an “OK” button in the lower right of the dialog. Simply pressing “Enter” should also dismiss the dialog. —Jeffrey

Hi, Jeffrey. Hello from San Francisco. This plug in sounds great but I can’t get it to work. I’ve enabled the plug in but when I select some photos, go to File – Plug In Extras and pick one of the plot suggestions, I get an error message that says (in this case for the Plot Focal Length selection):

An Internal Error has occurred
Could not load script doPlotFocalLength.lua

Any idea what could be going on? Maybe it’s because I’m choosing RAW images?

Thanks, Kevin

Sounds like your install is incomplete/corrupt. Try deleting the plugin entirely, then downloading/unzipping a fresh copy and move to where the old one was, or point the Plugin Manager where the new one is. —Jeffrey

Hello Jeffrey,

I find this plugin quite interesting and informative. Although Lightroom itself shows the focal length, for example, at which a photograph was taken, I find it useful to obtain the data for a whole collection of photographs. However, the data from the plugin do not always correspond with those shown in lightroom. For example, for a few photographs the plugin indicates a focal length that I do not even have available. Would you know why this is the case?

Thanks and all the best,
Florian.

Are you perhaps looking at the 35mm-equiv focal length? Perhaps select only a few photos, including one in error, generate the plot, then send a log with explicit details about what happens, what you expect, and how they differ. —Jeffrey

Just wanted to say “Thank You!” for this utility, it was exactly what I needed! And by the way I still have a copy of your remarkable regex book on my office shelf.

Thank you for the inclusion of the Canon 650D! The plugin is now working perfectly fine for me.

What I was getting at was this: How about making the focal length given in the EXIF the display-default? If there is an additional 35-equivalent number in the file, or the camera modal is “known”, the processed/calculated focal length could still be used, but if the raw data would be the default the plugin wouldn’t fail for every new camera that comes along.

For example, while my Canon 650D is now supported, and my Powershot S70 and S90 apparently already had been, every once in a while a shot from a smartphone camera or another person using a totally different camera sneaks in. Each time, the problem comes up again.

Most people find the raw focal length to be of little interest, especially when comparing data from a mixed batch of cameras. Your request for the raw focal length is the first I’ve heard in all these years. It is certainly a pain, though, having to add cameras manually. —Jeffrey

Of course, I understand the complexities – the algorithm has to cover the full range, and it can’t very well know where to “spread” and where to “narrow”.

Currently, I’m doing this:
click the triangle next to the first group, DO clear before
go back to the original folder(s), bring up stats again, click triangle next to second group, do NOT clear before
-> this gives all the shots in the first two groups (and only those) in the DataPlot-collection. But it’s slow, and it only works becaus e per coincidence the first two groups exactly comprise the particular lens.

An idea that would work for me whould be this: Next to the triangle, introduce a control that will split this particular group in two new ones. That way, if one wants to go down into details, he is only limited by window size – which can be expanded or scrolled manually. And the algorithm that chooses the groups in the first place would not need to be modified.

from Durham, NC

Hi Jeffrey,

Hope you were able to find some turkey sushi to celebrate yesterday!

For an upcoming workshop I’m teaching, I’m trying to get people to use Lightroom to analyze their lens usage patterns in both absolute numbers, as well as related to results (ie, “great” shots).

In doing so, I’m trying to create Excel data to allow various analysis of Lens vs. Focal Length Used vs. 5 star images.

Also trying to answer which is my “favorite” lens / focal length combination

Ditto for % portrait vs landscape vs square for 1 to 5 star images, based on focal length and lens.

Ditto for questions like “Do I need a wider lens?” (ie, distribution plot of use, by focal length,

Is your Data Plot the best tool for the job? (I also looked at ImageIngester but it’s not compatible with Lightroom 4+)

I’ve been foiled by Data Plot hangs:

I’ve updated to the latest version (data-plot-20131014.64.zip)

and under Lightroom 4.4 OS X, it’s still hanging when i run it against my main catalog.

Is there a memory leak? (see 60GB+ virtual memory, but plenty of physical memory and plenty 700GB+ of startup hard disk space).

I’ve tried arbitrary selecting fewer (eg, 200K) but it stills shows 100% complete, with net fewer images than the total.

“Cancel” does nothing.

I’ll email you directly to I include the screenshot.

txs,
-c

Check out my Data Exploter plugin for investigating these kinds of things. For the bug, please send a log and perhaps an associated screenshot, if you haven’t already. —Jeffrey

Ah, okay. Thank you! I’ll also do that plug-in as well.

Hi,
I am from Germany and a fan of your tools. Especially I like geoencoding, what is in permanent use.

I have a really big catalog with approx. 250.000 pictures in it. And many keywords.
And there my problem begins. I started without any plan creating keywords from beginning and meanwhile my keyword list is huge.
Thus I run into the (known) problem, that large keyword lists are no longer able to handle.
I just try to re-order my keywords and group them.
But it is not possible to drag and drop keywords, if your list is too long. It ends up with selecting a group of keywords instead of drag the one selected. Especially at the end of the list.
And it is a pain to re-order a keyword e.g. z….. underneath a keyword a… (select, hold mouse and wait until LR scrolls through the list, until you reached a….

In my opinion it would be great, if you have something like total commander for lightroom keywords to manage this. Having two windows where you can drag and drop between.

I browsed your tools and the links you provide. Great work !!! But I could not find what I requested.
Perhaps you can give me some hints, where to search or perhaps you have a solution for my problem.

Would be glad to hear from you.

Best Regards,
Klaus Burkhardt.

Sorry Klaus, but I don’t know of anything that will help here. —Jeffrey