About the App and Its Author
ShutterCheck is a true indie app made by Konstantin Pavlikhin, a longtime Mac-developer. Konstantin is known for his passion for riding two-wheels (mountain bikes 🚵🏼 & motorized dirt bikes 🏍️) and building useful native macOS applications. He is probably one of those guys who doesn’t join the iOS-developer crowd and still believes in productivity the good old Mac gives you when combined with proper apps.
The first ShutterCheck version (called “EOS Inspector” back then) was released in early 2014. I've made this app out of my own need to track the shutter count of my personal Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera. As it has happened several times before, I started out by trying to find some existing solution, but found myself disappointed either by the quality of applications on offer or their price. There were apps that were not Mac-alike at all and some of them also wanted to charge per each shutter count reading. Insane!
I thought it might be an opportunity to create a new product for this niche. A good native Mac app with reasonable pricing, offered for a one-time purchase. With this in mind I started reading about how modern digital cameras communicate with a host computer, what the PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) protocol is, what Canon proprietary extensions are and so on... In a way it was a low-hanging fruit because it turned out on older Canon camera models (pre-2014) it was pretty easy to get shutter count value, you just need to query some properties from a public camera interface and call it a day.
The app became quite popular within the photographic community around the world. Tens thousands of customers have had their cameras checked with ShutterCheck. After this a couple of years have passed while I was busy on my day-time macOS-developer job, eventually leading to me abandoning it in favour of going full-indie as I used to be.
During these years Canon obviously did not stand still and had created numerous new models that ShutterCheck was not compatible with. The old simple shutter count retrieval method had become obsolete. I wanted to make ShutterCheck the best shutter count app on a Mac again so I jumped into this reverse-engineering rabbit-hole and after long hours of research have re-made the app from scratch using the best Apple platform technologies of the day, including Swift and AppKit.
Since summer of 2018 the ShutterCheck v2 had become available for purchase. I'm now working on ShutterCheck full-time and regularly update the app as new Canon cameras hit the market. If you're on a Mac and looking for a decent app that would read shutter count of your DSLR or mirrorless Canon EOS camera, please give ShutterCheck a try! These days I offer a demo version that you can download for free to preview the product and check compatibility with your camera before making a purchase.
I hope you'll find my little app useful! ❤️
K. P.