Herb Segars Photography Blog

I am currently getting ready to sell my Nikon D-200. I have upgraded to two Nikon D-300’s and I have been hanging onto to the D200. I am not sure why but that’s the way that I am. I still have a Nikon N90 film camera. I held onto it because one of the magazines that I worked for just wouldn’t  switch to digital. By the time they finally did there was no market for the N90. It now sits on a shelf as a nick knack (an expensive one at that). I began to get all the pertinent equipment together that goes with the camera body, took some pictures for EBay and began researching the value of the camera and the descriptions that other sellers were using. I noticed that a few were advertising low shutter clicks. Apparently, Nikon cameras should last for about 100,000 clicks of the shutter so having a low number of clicks on the body would be an advantage when selling. I have been a photographer for a long time but I never thought much about shutter clicks. I don’t  think that there was a way to find out the number on a film camera so I set out on a Google search to find out how to determine the number. Two programs jumped out at me and I looked at them to see which would work best in my situation. If you have a Nikon camera, then you might want to try Dr. Chung’s Preview Extractor. I downloaded and tried to use it and immediately ran into a problem. I solved it quickly but the way to do that isn’t really clear. I will describe the situation as it happened to me.

When you start the program, this is the screen that you will see. I didn’t want to extract jpegs from raw files, I wanted to do a shutter count. In the top menu, next to “Check for Update” is a selection named “Shutter Count”. I clicked on it and got this:

I selected “Run” and came to the following screen:

This is where things got a little wacky for me. I connected my D200 to my laptop with a USB cable and navigated to the compact flash card on the camera. It shows up in the navigation menu as a separate hard drive named D200. It didn’t show any photos. I tried a few times and no luck. Finally, I decided to take the last photo taken with the D200 and transfer it to my Desktop. I then searched for that file:

I selected “Load Image” and this is what I saw:

My D200 camera has 10,822 shutter clicks. That is pretty low considering that a Nikon shutter should last for 100,000 shutter clicks. By the way, this program is free. You can donate to the software designer if you find the program useful.

The second program only works on Jpeg and Tiff files so if you are shooting in Raw, you will have to convert your file to one of those formats. That shouldn’t be a problem because all of us that shoot in Raw convert to Jpeg or Tff anyway. The name of the program is Opanda IExif. It is also a fre program which does have a Pro version that does more than the free version and costs $19.99 USD. What I found out after downloading and installing it was that it did not show the shutter clicks for my Nikon D200 or Nikon D300 jpeg’s. I suppose that it may work with some cameras but it didn’t with mine.

I also read on the web that you can find the number of shutter clicks using Photoshop CS3 or CS4 by opening the file and choosing “File” “File Info” and then “Advanced” and clicking on the Exif Info section. I did not find the shutter clicks there for my Nikon D300 photo.

I found another program named ExifTool by Phil Harvey. This one worked great but understanding how to use it was also a little tough. Actually, I just had to read the “How to Use This Software” directions and all was well. What is it with us guys and directions? I downloaded the “Windows Executable” File (zip file) and extracted it to a directory. There is only one file named “exiftool(-k).exe”. To make this work, move this file to your desktop and then when you want to read the Exif  information (which includes shutter count), drag your file onto the file name on the desktop. You will have a window open like the one below:

You can see that the image count is the same as that obtained using Dr. Chung’s Preview Extractor. I am not sure that this will work with every brand of camera and I have only been looking for tools that would work on Windows and not on a Mac as I don’t own a Mac. If you have software that will work as well, please chime in here. In the meantime, I have found what I needed to help (?) enhance my sale of my mint D200.

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