ExifTool Forum

Hi,  I hope I'm posting this question to the right forum.  I was using the script http://tools.science.si/index.php to extract the shutter count from photo's taken with my Sony RX1.  It returned with the error stating that the file is not supported.  Is there a work-around for this?  I've tried using it to extract other photo's taken with my sony a850 and it worked flawlessly.

It does look like that script uses ExifTool, so you are in the right place.

ExifTool doesn't (yet) extract the ShutterCount from RX1 images.  I'll see what I can do about this.  Best case scenario is that this feature could be added to ExifTool 9.51.

- Phil

Thanks Phil,

so do you have an estimate as to when 9.51 is scheduled to be release? and Before then, is there anyway I can extract this information.  I am a programmer myself and if it's a matter of just pulling out a specific byte within a file, then I can attempt it myself.  I just need a bit of guidance or documentation I can reference.  any help before then would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
matt 

Hi Matt,

It would be great if you could find where this information is stored.  Use the -U option and look for values that increment between images.  The only trick is that you must check with some pictures that use multiple shutter releases for a single image (ie. HDR) to see if you are looking at a ShutterCount or an ImageCount.

I usually release a new version every Saturday morning.

- Phil

Hi Phil,

I did what you suggested, I took 3 consecutive pics with the same rx1 camera.  Pulled the metadata from the arw file using exiftool.exe -u <filename>.  The output for each file is attached.  I went line by line to compare but couldn't find any values that looked to be increment between the 3 files.  would the "-u" parameter pull all the metadata or is there another parameter I should try?  I included the output files just incase you have time for a quick look.  I can't believe sony would go to such lengths to withhold this information.

You should try -U (capital "U").  This gives a lot more output than the -u that you used, but it may be a lot of work to go through this line by line.  If you want to send me something, post the original EXIF instead (the output file from this command):

exiftool -exif:all -o out.exif <filename>

- Phil

Hi Phil,

Attached are the exif files using the command you suggested

also, I tried using the -U parameter this morning and found 3 tags that incremented.  Specifically they are:
                                                       
                                                  file 1                                 file 2                        file 3
Sony Tag 2010e 0x0379            11                                       12                           13
Sony Tag 2010e 0x0c87             30                                       31                           32                 
Sony Tag 2010e 0x0db7             29                                       30                           31

Obviously these are too low to be the actual shutter counts but I thought I'd let you know what I found anyhow.  Maybe it makes more sense to you.

attached file

You're right.  These are the only 3 bytes in the output that increase monotonically.  The Sony ShutterCount value is normally 3 bytes, and the byte order is little-endian, so we would be looking for 3 bytes like this that have two more constant bytes afterwards that contain the higher-order part of the value.

But unfortunately, none of these looks right:

Sony Tag 2010e 0x0379 - followed by 2 zero bytes for all files
Sony Tag 2010e 0x0c87 - followed by bytes that change between files
Sony Tag 2010e 0x0db7 - followed by bytes that change between files

So it isn't in this output.  However, not all information is output even with the -U option.  I'll do a bit more searching.  If you could upload a longer sequence of exif files (say 7 shots) it would be useful.

- Phil

Hi Phil,

Here is a sequence of 8 shots I took today.  Pls let me know if you need anything else.

sequence 6 thru 8

The longer sequence really helps to eliminate false positives.

Unfortunately though, it eliminated everything.  I also checked the data in the blocks that aren't split into separate tags (seen with -u -n), with and without decryption, and didn't find anything that looked like a shutter count.  (I also looked for bytes that wrapped from 255 back to 0 in the sequence.)

So I am not able to decode ShutterCount from these images.  Sorry.

- Phil

Thanks for trying Phil.  Keep up the great work.  Much appreciated.