Canon EOS Shutter Count

Wondering how many your canon DSLR camera shutter have actuated? This tutorial will show you how to check your Canon camera’s shutter count. Please take a note, not all canon EOS camera shutter count can be read out, only recent digic III and IV camera should be able to read out. There are many methods to get the shutter counts, but you definitely will use a computer either MAC or PC.

Let’s start with Mac. For MAC user, you can use gphoto2 to check your camera shutter count. This also apply to LINUX users, which is rare among photographer 🙂 but the tutorial below i will explain only for MAC user, and I consider LINUX user are expert and can install gphoto2 on its own.

gphoto2 is a free open source program. //www.gphoto.org/proj/gphoto2/ to install gphoto2 on your MAC start your command line console and type this command

brew install gphoto2

The HomeBrew Instalation wil begin, it will install all necessary files for your MAC to be able to run gphoto2. The gphoto2 instalation should complete with no errors.

After the completion of the instalation, you hsould turn on your Canon camera and plug it to your USB cable to your MAC. after this was done you can type this command in your command console:

killall PTPCamera

if you are not entering that command you will get this error later

An error occurred in the io-library ('Could not claim the USB device'): 
Could not claim interface 0 (m). 
Make sure no other program or kernel module (such as sdc2xx, stv680, spca50x) 
is using the device and you have read/write access to the device.
*** Error (-53: 'Could not claim the USB device') ***

If you are done with “killlall” command you can exploring the gphoto2. To be able ro read the shuttercounter you must have access to the config of the camera. you just type this to read out the shutter count

gphoto2 --get-config /main/status/shuttercounter

if it is resulting this informations…

Label: Shutter Counter
Type: TEXT
Current: 53288

Then your shutter count info is read out, the number of 53288 is the shutter count  value. 😀

gphoto2 has a lot of abilities you can explore with, it can take pictures from your computer, and there is so much possible uses than just to read out the shutter count.