Fifteen years ago, this question was very significant (for most cameras) as an indication of wear and remaining functional life. If you were to purchase a used camera, you would certainly want to know the answer to this question. Today, this is not as true as it used to be.
Mechanical/moving parts are subject to some degree of wear. Metal parts suffer from friction. Plastic parts may become brittle. They eventually wear out. Get maintenance or get rid of it. But many of today’s digital cameras don’t have moving parts and do not suffer the same effects of wear. They have electronic sensors and electronic shutters.
Cameras have commonly remembered how many times the shutter has been actuated (how many photos have been captured). Through various means, you may be able to retrieve that information from a camera. In many digital cameras today, shutter count information may not be available at all. Furthermore, digital cameras are often used to capture video (rather than still photos) and the shutter count isn’t useful information.
That being said, I recently decided to sell a DSLR from 2015. Any DSLR certainly has mechanical parts and the shutter typically has an expected lifespan. As I had used this camera for still photography (not video), the shutter count is useful information. But retrieving this information from the camera proved a bit difficult. Here are several methods that generally might succeed, but in the case of my camera, I found that only one of these methods succeeded.
- If you have software that shows EXIF information within an image, every digital photo may include the shutter count.
Didn’t work. While all digital cameras report EXIF, not all cameras include shutter count in that data.
(Online comment: “Last camera from Canon with shutter count in EXIF was EOS 1D II N.”) - Some websites: you upload an image from your camera and it will read shutter count from the EXIF information
Didn’t work. See explanation above. - FreeShutterCount (freeware)
Requires installing some 3-rd party USB drivers … no thanks (I’m not going to risk installing some unverified USB drivers on my computer.) - EOSinfo (freeware)
Doesn’t work with my camera model. - EOS Digital Info (freeware)
Doesn’t work with my camera model. - DIRE Studio Shutter Count (freeware)
Apple/Mac only; I don’t have any Apple/Mac devices. - Tornado EOS
Multiple people have reported this software contains malware. - AstroPhotography Tool (APT)
Reported shutter count = 30,000
An online search for “expected shutter lifetime Canon EOS cameras” tells me that this camera model should happily provlde 200,000 shutter actuations without any problems. My camera has 30,000 shutter actuations.