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ExploreCams pulls metadata from photo sharing sites to show most popular cameras

Canon EOS 5DS R
Jessica Lee Star/Digital Trends
Every time you press the shutter, your camera not only captures the photograph, it also records a lot of data that’s stored inside the image file.

This information is referred to as metadata. And when viewed inside a comparable program, it will show you almost every piece of detail about the image, from shutter speed to GPS location of where you captured the image — if you have a GPS-enabled camera.

Although this information can be manually removed or scrubbed out by social media sites, much of it is retained when uploading it to photography hosting and sharing sites, as a way to better help other photographers understand how an image was captured and what gear was used.

Using this publicly available information, a team of developers created ExploreCams, a mesmerizing website that pulls metadata from photographs hosted Flickr, 500px, Pixabay, and others to show off live statistics of the most popular cameras and settings used by photographers around the globe.

To do this, ExploreCams relies on metadata reading tool ExifTool. Using this, ExploreCams performs weekly refreshes and updates its databases and infographics accordingly. Already, over six million images have been indexed.

The results, which are shown off in beautiful interactive graphs, aren’t that surprising if you’ve been around the photography world long enough. Canon holds the lead for the most commonly used camera, with Nikon coming in a close second. Sony rounds out the top three, while Apple — led by its latest iOS devices — comes in at fourth.

As for lenses, it appears as though kit lenses take the top spot for most manufacturers. Not exactly surprising considering the lenses are packaged with the camera bodies and offer an affordable starting point.

It’s easy to get lost in the data, so consider yourself warned if you want to dive down the ExploreCam rabbit hole. If you have time to burn, head on over and check it out in its entirety.

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A comparison of draft, standard, and high-quality photos from Epson's EcoTank ET-8500. Tracey Truly / Digital Trends

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Crutchfield sale: Save on Canon, Sony and Nikon mirrorless cameras
Canon EOS R5

Photography can be a fun and even lucrative endeavor, although it also can be exceedingly expensive, with some of the best full-frame cameras on the market easily reaching and even exceeding one or two thousand dollars, and that's without taking into account the cost of the lenses. Luckily, there is a great sale at Crutchfield right now on various cameras and camera kits, and you can actually grab yourself some excellent cameras, whether you're just starting out or want to upgrade to the next level. To that end, we've picked some of our favorite deals below, although it's well worth checking out the full Crutchfield sale that's happenning now.

What you should buy in Crutchfield's camera sale
If you're just starting out with photography and don't want to spend the thousands of dollars you do for the slightly better cameras that you'll find in the mid-range, the Canon EOS R100 is an excellent option, and this kit includes a lens as well. It has a 24.1-megapixel sensor for high-quality photography, a 3-inch screen so you can get a better sense of what you're filming, and, of course, the RF-S 18-45mm f/4.5-6.3 lens that the kit comes with. It can also connect with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and all of that comes packaged at , which is $100 off the usual $599 price tag.

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