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Lightroom Dashboard - A New Free Tool

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Cheyne

Cheyne

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Hey guys

I was looking for a tool to show me some statistics on my photos a little while ago in order to better understand what my most common camera settings were. I think I was trying to justify buying a new lens, although it was a little clunky using the Lightroom interface to get this info.

I wanted to know
  • my most common apertures
  • my most common focal lengths
  • my photo volumes over the past 2 years
  • how much usage my lenses get
  • how much usage my cameras get
I found some other tools online that claimed to use your Lightroom library to do some of these, although they all sucked, required me to install plugins or pay money and they were pretty ugly to look at.

I’m a software engineer, so I wrote my own. It’s free to use, doesn’t require you to install anything and runs completely in your browser. None of your data is uploaded, nor does it leave your machine.

Simply drag your Lightroom Catalog (.lrcat) file onto the page and it will analyze your data and visualize your catalog meta data for you into some nice charts.

I have plenty of ideas for more features to add, although i’m releasing the base version now to see what people think and if there are any “must have” features that are requested.

You can consider it beta software for now, please let me know if you spot any bugs. Tested in Chrome and FireFox.

Take a look, and let me know what you think

https://www.lightroomdashboard.com

Sample dashboard
Sample dashboard

--
Blog
http://www.apertureaddict.com
My Shots
https://www.flickr.com/cheynewallace
https://500px.com/CheyneWallace
 
Last edited:
I just ran it through Safari. Pretty neat. Nothing much else to say. . . but a thank you is warranted. I may have more thoughts later on.

Thanks, again, for your effort, skill for this, and generosity.
 
Thanks Bob, You're welcome.

Hopefully you find some use for it at some stage.

If you have any feedback, i'm also open to suggestions.

Cheers
 
Cheyne said:
Thanks Bob, You're welcome.

Hopefully you find some use for it at some stage.
Click to expand...
Oh, I found it most interesting, summarizing all that it does. Not sure I'd want to look at that very often, never really cared about all it shows before. But now that I see it all laid out I might come to find it more useful in some manner moving forward.

Others I'm sure will find it much more useful - you might want to share the link in a few of the popular camera model forums too.
Cheyne said:
If you have any feedback, i'm also open to suggestions.
Click to expand...
Sure, as (and if) I utilize it more. So far. . .

- A 960mb Catalog loaded fine on a MacBook Retina through Safari

- On my iMac with a 1.3gb and a 4.5gb catalog file it failed to load through Safari.

Just tried it out quick between other chores going on.

--
...Bob, NYC
.
"Well, sometimes the magic works. . . Sometimes, it doesn't." - Chief Dan George, Little Big Man
.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobtullis/
http://www.bobtullis.com
.
 
Last edited:
Cheyne said:
Thanks Bob, You're welcome.

Hopefully you find some use for it at some stage.

If you have any feedback, i'm also open to suggestions.
Click to expand...
I didn't try it yet - just looking at the screenshot, it looks pretty nice !

The kinds of things I'd want to know are:

% of lens usage on 1 particular camera

% of time I shoot a particular lens wide open

% of lens usage among 5-star images

% of focal length usage for a particular lens

% of focal length usage for a particular trip (range of dates)

% of shots taken with a certain lens that are at or below 1/EFL shutter speed

% breakdown by ISO

Basically, I use the metadata filters to narrow down the images, then choose the last column to see the data. I think your tool would be much more useful if you could provide a similar set of metadata filters that you use to narrow down the catalog and look at a subset of it. (I'm sure you could simulate this by filtering in LR, then exporting the filtered files to a separate catalog, but that's way too much overhead).

Anyway, great job on the program.

- Dennis
 
klauspauk said:
Excellent. I will let you know if I can think of something missing. Thank you for this great tool!
Click to expand...
Cheers, you're welcome.

@Bob, the size of the catalog shouldn't make too much difference. It's loaded in memory on your machine, not on my server so it's up to your machine and browser to decide how fast it loads. Super old machines with minimal memory will have a harder time loading the data.

I'm using some pretty modern techniques to parse the catalog data so i'm expecting older browsers to have problems. Any recent copy of Chrome or FireFox should be fine on any machine.
 
Dennis said:
The kinds of things I'd want to know are:

% of lens usage on 1 particular camera

% of time I shoot a particular lens wide open

% of lens usage among 5-star images

% of focal length usage for a particular lens

% of focal length usage for a particular trip (range of dates)

% of shots taken with a certain lens that are at or below 1/EFL shutter speed

% breakdown by ISO

Basically, I use the metadata filters to narrow down the images, then choose the last column to see the data. I think your tool would be much more useful if you could provide a similar set of metadata filters that you use to narrow down the catalog and look at a subset of it. (I'm sure you could simulate this by filtering in LR, then exporting the filtered files to a separate catalog, but that's way too much overhead).

Anyway, great job on the program.

- Dennis
Click to expand...
 
Cheyne said:
klauspauk said:
Excellent. I will let you know if I can think of something missing. Thank you for this great tool!
Click to expand...
Cheers, you're welcome.

@Bob, the size of the catalog shouldn't make too much difference. It's loaded in memory on your machine, not on my server so it's up to your machine and browser to decide how fast it loads. Super old machines with minimal memory will have a harder time loading the data.

I'm using some pretty modern techniques to parse the catalog data so i'm expecting older browsers to have problems. Any recent copy of Chrome or FireFox should be fine on any machine.
Click to expand...
I tried it again. . . where it failed I have 16gb memory on a 3 year old iMac. I have to verify whether the catalogs I've tried to load have been updated to LR6, however. . . I'll get around to that later or so.
 
That's a good point. I've not tested it on older Lightroom Catalogs. Only the latest
Bob Tullis said:
I tried it again. . . where it failed I have 16gb memory on a 3 year old iMac. I have to verify whether the catalogs I've tried to load have been updated to LR6, however. . . I'll get around to that later or so.
Click to expand...
 
Thank you very much for this tool!
 
Using FF 39 it crashes my browser every time I drag the catalog to the browser window.
 
Dan Marchant said:
Using FF 39 it crashes my browser every time I drag the catalog to the browser window.

-
Click to expand...
Hey Dan, FF39 should be fine, what version of Lightroom are you using?

It was built around the latest Lightroom CC, havn't tested older catalogs.

P.S , if anyone has a catalog that crashes like this, and it's not of a huge size, and you don't mind sharing I would like to get my hands on a copy of the file so I can attempt to make the tool backwards compatible with older versions of Lightroom.
 
I just dug up an old Lightroom 5 backup catalog and it loaded fine for me. So there goes that idea.

If you're having a problem loading your catalog, please open the javascript console on your browser and try loading it again. Post back any errors you see .
 
Cheyne said:
Hey guys

I was looking for a tool to show me some statistics on my photos a little while ago in order to better understand what my most common camera settings were. I think I was trying to justify buying a new lens, although it was a little clunky using the Lightroom interface to get this info.

I wanted to know
  • my most common apertures
  • my most common focal lengths
  • my photo volumes over the past 2 years
  • how much usage my lenses get
  • how much usage my cameras get
I found some other tools online that claimed to use your Lightroom library to do some of these, although they all sucked, required me to install plugins or pay money and they were pretty ugly to look at.

I’m a software engineer, so I wrote my own. It’s free to use, doesn’t require you to install anything and runs completely in your browser. None of your data is uploaded, nor does it leave your machine.

Simply drag your Lightroom Catalog (.lrcat) file onto the page and it will analyze your data and visualize your catalog meta data for you into some nice charts.

I have plenty of ideas for more features to add, although i’m releasing the base version now to see what people think and if there are any “must have” features that are requested.

You can consider it beta software for now, please let me know if you spot any bugs. Tested in Chrome and FireFox.

Take a look, and let me know what you think

https://www.lightroomdashboard.com

Sample dashboard
Sample dashboard

--
Blog
http://www.apertureaddict.com
My Shots
https://www.flickr.com/cheynewallace
https://500px.com/CheyneWallace
Click to expand...
Easy to use and very informative. Thank you.
 
It's basically a much better looking alternative to the LR Analytics Tool plugin that's been around for a while.

However, LRAT has still one big thing going for it: it's a LR plugin with a processing webpage you install on your own server/machine.

If you can make a download version available one can install on their own server, I'd switch to this in a heartbeat. I will not upload my catalog over the internet to some site I don't know, regardless of the real, perceived or imaginary risk.

Regardless, it may be a good thing to check into LRAT and see what they do. Instead of loading the catalog file, which is basically a container with lots of other files, they create a single file metadata dump which may be easier to process with a large volume of images.
 
afterburn said:
It's basically a much better looking alternative to the LR Analytics Tool plugin that's been around for a while.

However, LRAT has still one big thing going for it: it's a LR plugin with a processing webpage you install on your own server/machine.

If you can make a download version available one can install on their own server, I'd switch to this in a heartbeat. I will not upload my catalog over the internet to some site I don't know, regardless of the real, perceived or imaginary risk.

Regardless, it may be a good thing to check into LRAT and see what they do. Instead of loading the catalog file, which is basically a container with lots of other files, they create a single file metadata dump which may be easier to process with a large volume of images.

--
Gijs from The Netherlands
Nikon D800/Fuji X-T1
Click to expand...
A Lightroom Plugin is on the cards for future development, but as I stated in the original post, and in the tagline of the website, your catalog is never uploaded anywhere, it does not ever leave your browser. There is no benefit to running your own local version of this tool on your server. It would simply provide a different URL.

It would be silly to expect people to upload a 2GB catalog file over the internet to view some statistics. All the calculations are done in your browser and your data stays on your machine. Which is why your dashboard will load in only a few seconds.

--
Blog
http://www.apertureaddict.com
My Shots
https://www.flickr.com/cheynewallace
https://500px.com/CheyneWallace
 
Last edited:
LastChance4U said:
Curious.... I try to drag my .lrcat file to the browser and I get an undefined error? Windows 7 64, Chrome, and LR6.
Click to expand...
Is there any message with it? or just undefined?
 
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