Getting the serial number from a 5D2 file

[Mike-D]

Hi there,

I'm wondering if there is a trick I am unaware of to get the serial number for a 5D2 file for use in batch renaming during ingest. The listed tokens (snum, serial, serialnum) don't seem to work. 4.5.3.1 on an intel mac.

Thanks,

...Mike

[Hayo Baan]

Mike,

You're not the first to ask for this. However, it seems the serial number is either not encoded into the file at all, or at least encoded in such a way that it can not (yet) be deciphered (even the latest version of ExifTool isn't able to do this).

Perhaps in the future it is possible to decode the serial number. If this is the case, I'm sure Camerabits will add this to PM as well.

Cheers,
    Hayo

[Kirk Baker]

Mike,

I'm wondering if there is a trick I am unaware of to get the serial number for a 5D2 file for use in batch renaming during ingest. The listed tokens (snum, serial, serialnum) don't seem to work. 4.5.3.1 on an intel mac.

More recent versions of Photo Mechanic should be able to get the serial number of a Canon 5D Mark II.  I believe we added support for that camera in version 4.6.

Hayo: the information that is harder to divine is the 'actuation' or 'shutter' count.  Serial numbers should not be a problem.

-Kirk

[Phil Harvey]

However, it seems the serial number is either not encoded into the file at all, or at least encoded in such a way that it can not (yet) be deciphered (even the latest version of ExifTool isn't able to do this).

But ExifTool does extract the 5DmkII serial number:

exiftool CanonEOS5D_MarkII.jpg -serialnumber
Camera Body No.                 : 0000000432

- Phil

[Hayo Baan]

However, it seems the serial number is either not encoded into the file at all, or at least encoded in such a way that it can not (yet) be deciphered (even the latest version of ExifTool isn't able to do this).

But ExifTool does extract the 5DmkII serial number:

exiftool CanonEOS5D_MarkII.jpg -serialnumber
Camera Body No.                 : 0000000432

Oops, you're absolutely right. I was looking for a field in the output called anything with "serial" in it. Never thought it would be called "Camera Body No.".  My bad. Sorry 

[Kevin M. Cox]

I can confirm that the latest version of PM does accurately report the serial number on images from the EOS 5D Mark II.