I enjoy photography and often find myself with over 5,000 images when I get home. I’ve been searching for a tool that shows which shooting settings I use most. That info is really useful for spotting trends, such as which lenses I reach for most and at what focal lengths, apertures, ISO values, and shutter speeds. These insights help me decide which lenses to buy.

I started with a simple Python script that invoked ExifTool on every image file in a folder to pull out focal length, aperture, exposure, ISO, and model data and rendered a basic ASCII progress bar in the terminal. It quickly became obvious, that spawning ExifTool once per image and counting files through repeated directory walks was too slow for libraries with more than a couple thousand images. I fixed this by switching to a single ExifTool pass that outputs metadata for every file and throttling progress updates to every 50 images kept the UI responsive without overwhelming the UI thread.