Determining the Shot Count on a Leica M

 In Capture One Pro, Leica, Leica Tip, Tech

What do you want first? The good news or the bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news, you cant. Not anymore at least. It used to be that, hidden within he EXIF data of an image from your Leica M, you could find an Image ID number. You would then need to use a calculator to convert the “hexadecimal value” to decimal form…. blah blah blah. Long story short, Leica must have caught on that we cracked their code on “encrypting” the shot count into the file, and they removed it.

Don’t trust us? Follow the instructions below that USED to give you the “Image ID” field where the shot count could be calculated from. It no longer exists.

So, what could possibly be the good news. You don’t need to waste any more of your time skimming through forums and lengthy articles to no avail. It may not be the answer you like, but at least you’ve found one.

Old Instructions

For our Mac users, here is a quick tip for determining the shot count (actuations) on a Leica M camera.

On a Mac, navigate to the most recent image taken with the Leica M camera using the Finder.
Right Click (or hold down Control + click) on the image and choose Open With > Preview.
Open the Inspector by clicking on the Tools menu > Show Inspector or with the keyboard shortcut Command + I.
Click on the Information tab in the Inspector, then click on the EXIF tab. Locate the Unique Image ID (you may need to enlarge the window to see the full ID).
Open the Calculator app on your computer, and change to Programmer mode by clicking on the View menu > Programmer or using the keyboard shortcut Command + 3.
Verify the 16 button is selected in the top right of the calculator, then enter in the Image ID. You do not need to enter all of the zeros, but make sure you enter everything to the right of the first non-zero digit. For example, 000000010000 would be 10000. In this case, we enter just 22D6A.
Click on the 10 button next to the 16 button you selected earlier. This converts the hexadecimal value into decimal form, giving us the shot count of the Leica M.

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