By Joe Rosensteel

March 23, 2023 9:45 AM PT

Pivoting to Numbers

Not too long ago I came the realization that I have a lot of camera equipment, and that I didn’t know where all of it was, or what condition it was in. Like most hobbyist photographers, it all starts with a low-end DSLR… and then flash forward 15 years and not only have you bought many cameras and lenses, but you have inherited even more.

I kept thinking I would track this with a personal, bespoke wiki, or Craft, or Obsidian, as nerds are wont to do, but they didn’t seem to fit the bill. I needed to be able to know not just their details on a page, but details across all of it.

Unfortunately, this meant spreadsheets. I work with really complicated, intricate software all day long, but I almost never do anything with office productivity software that’s more complicated than a 2nd grade book report, so this was admittedly a little humbling to fumble my way through this.

Kieran Healy and Dr. Drang can stop reading now.

The particulars

I needed to be able to sort and process the data in a non-destructive way, that would auto-update as new data was entered, or edited. I needed a solution that was going to be able to be used—not just read—on iOS and my Mac. It should ideally not cost very much, and not nag me to upgrade along the way.

When I posted about my needs on Mastodon, real professionals replied and suggested Google Sheets and AirTable. I immediately eliminated AirTable after going through its pushy account sign-up and intimidating set-up process. If you’re someone that uses AirTable for other things in your life, it’s probably great for the task. But it didn’t seem like a worthy investment of my time to watch a lot of how-to videos on AirTable for this one project.

Google Sheets certainly works on iOS and the Mac, and while I know there are many complaints about Google’s iOS apps, it’s easy to live with it as I’m not doing iOS-centric things that rely on share sheets and multi-app workflows.

At the same time, I tried Apple’s Numbers app, which no one suggested. I’m generally dismissive of Apple’s productivity programs (after ClarisWorks 2.0, that is) because they do weird stuff. I really don’t like the constant desire to show everything in the app as if I’m going to print it.

I’m not going to print it. Ever.

Can’t we have a display mode or something that kills all this extra white space? A mode for people that don’t have “Cyan Cartridge is Low” warnings?

And of course the iOS version on Numbers doesn’t seem to have a “paste and match style” option, so god forbid you only wanted to copy text and not the hot styling of Nikon’s archived spec sheets. When you paste a URL, the iOS clipboard actually includes the PDF object in addition to the URL—and Numbers helpfully decides that I want to embed a PDF in a spreadsheet cell.

I don’t want that. Ever.

Several months ago, when the updated version of Numbers that included pivot table support was released I had no idea what it was or why anyone would use such a thing. Plot twist! I love pivot tables in Numbers, and the feature works well on both my Mac and my iPhone… albeit a little better on the Mac.

With pivot tables I can do exactly what I wanted to do, making little reports that do things like count items in locations, or list which cameras are missing batteries. Or list which cameras are missing entirely! I can see a little list of just what cameras are ready to go on a trip.

I still loathe the printer-friendly, iPhone-unfriendly look of the document, but I couldn’t use Google Sheets because it only supports pivot tables in a desktop web browser. (Now I understand why the iOS-centric people are always annoyed by Google apps! I’m sorry for doubting you.)

How it’s organized

In my Numbers document, I have a table that has all of my cameras, their location, battery type, a checkbox for if it has a battery, charger type, if it has a charger, camera type, lens system, film or sensor size, sensor resolution, spec sheet or manual URL.

The second table is all of my lenses, with the minimum and maximum focal length, maximum aperture and maximum aperture zoomed (zoom lenses often have a lower maximum aperture at the highest end of their zoom range), mount type, autofocus checkbox, autofocus motor in the lens checkbox, vibration reduction/optical steady shot checkbox for stabilized lenses, and the location of the lens.

From the two tables I’ve been able to generate a pivot table that’s filtered by lens mount (F-Mount), and filters out any prime lenses (maximum focal length value has to be present). I can generate a pivot table of which cameras are missing batteries, and what those batteries are. I can even just count the number of cameras by type, and a grand total. All without doing any destructive operations or copying and pasting my original sheet to do edits on it. It’s all live updating and looks like the same printer-friendly document on my computer and my phone.

My next steps involve inventorying film (Kodak recently raised prices, so I bought up a big batch of film like a lot of other dorks) and adding formulas to do conversions (like focal length for lenses on APS-C sensors). A pivot table can’t do that math, it can just arrange, filter, and summarize.

I’ve also started entering the manufacturers manual or spec sheet URLs for cameras, but now that DPReview is going to shutdown and be wiped from the internet sometime shortly after, I also want to archive their camera and lens reviews for models that I have so I can add those file paths to the table.

All of this work means I no longer have to remember, or search the Internet, for all these little things like filter thread size and chargers. Which is good, since it’s been years since I was tracking one dinky camera—and while I might not be shooting with all of these cameras, they’re all important to me or someone else in my family. I’m glad to have all the data accessible in one place, at last.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]