Ten years behind the lens

Lightroom dashboard

My Adobe Lightroom catalogue file was a treasure trove of insightful information just waiting to be cracked open.

It’s always kind of bugged me that Lightroom didn’t have an at-a-glance view of my photography stats. The Library module does have handy filters for viewing photos by year, camera, lens, as well as labels, flags and star ratings, but trends and habits are more difficult to understand. I started to think a bit more about this again as I curated my favourite shots from 2025 for my annual photo book. I was curious how my photography habits have changed over time. I mean, I know they have, but I wanted a clearer (ahem) picture.

Jeepers keepers!

The number of flagged photos compared to the total captured is my keeper rate. And I was largely interested in understanding how that has changed over the past decade. Yes, I could have done the quick math but I thought some other interesting details might emerge. I was curious if Claude could query the data from an .lrcat file, and lo and behold, it can (apparently, it’s basically a SQLite database). So I made a copy, fed it into my project and started thinking about how I wanted to present the data. I won’t bore you with all of the iterations, but suffice it to say, I found some really interesting results about my shooting style.

The dashboard

I’ll skip to the chase. Have a peek at how I’ve taken photos since 2016 on my Lightroom dashboard. You can filter by year, camera body, lens, focal range and more.

Screenshot of my Lightroom dashboard
The current iteration of my Lightroom dashboard.

How I use Lightroom

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Adobe Lightroom. It was the de-facto software when I first started becoming serious enthusiastic about photography. The non-destructive editing and library management is the best I’ve used (and I’ve tried most other options). But Adobe’s subscription pricing model is expensive and inflexible. I had a 6-month affair with CaptureOne; it came close, but ultimately my muscle-memory with Lightroom and its Blurb photobook integration drew me back.

My editing style has certainly changed over the years. I had a tendency to overbake my photos, which (I hope) is no longer the case. But my workflow remains largely the same: import from the SD card, a quick pass to decide on keepers (keyboard shortcut P to flag a shot, U to un-flag it), then into the Develop module for processing. No star ratings or colour-coding for me. A few presets start it off then I tweak exposure, tone curve and detail. I’ll often decide against keeping a photo after I do my processing — in which case I’ll reset the photo (⇧⌘R) and un-flag it. I used to enjoy spending hours doing this, but these days I favour a much quicker editing session.

Data hygiene

I prefer a prime lens to zooms and I love adapting old vintage lenses and compact m-mount glass to my cameras. Manual lenses typically don’t have electronic contacts so cannot record lens information to the photo’s EXIF data. A Lightroom plugin called LensTagger solved the issue. Prior to discovering this tool, I would add keyword tags to photos to identify the lens. But I wasn’t consistent with that practice and that meant almost 14,000 early photos do not have any lens info. Claude did however, make quick work of inferring lenses by using the keyword tags I did have (conveniently, my Fujifilm XPro-3 has a feature to register a manual lens in-camera). Note: Because of this missing information, my keeper rate may be skewed a bit.

The highlights

That still leaves a lot of data to draw from: about 72,000 photos, from 46 lenses on 5 camera bodies! Here are the interesting bits:

And you can too

This seems like an easy thing for Adobe to implement, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I heartily encourage you to crack open your Lightroom catalogue file and spin up a DIY dashboard with your preferred LLM. I’d love to hear about it if you do!