So in my previous post I showed how you can leverage PowerShell and the .NET framework to analyse your photo collection and get some meaningful statistics from them, in my example figuring out the frequency distribution of the focal lengths at which you take your photographs. 

The results are presented in a simple hash table, which does the job but doesn’t make it very easy to visualise the results, presenting the data in a chart would make the output a lot easier to understand.  You could just copy past the output into Excel and create a chart from the data, but I thought there must be a way to do this within PowerShell; so after a quick dig and a very helpful blog post later this is what I came up with:

Changes

Once your script grows over a 100 lines it starts to get really hard to keep track of what’s going on, so whilst functions are great at wrapping up bits of repeatable and reusable code, I find they are good for breaking your script down into easy to manage sections of code.  Finally I coordinate the script via control logic in the ‘main’ at the end of the script, which is around 15 line of code including comments, but very readable!

The two functions (and parameters) I have added are:

• get-FocalLengths <files>
  • returns the frequency distribution in a hashtable
• createChart <hashtable of values> <title> <x-axis title> <y-axis title>
  • Takes a hashtable (which doesn’t have to be focal lengths) and creates a chart, prints it to screen and writes it to a file

Part of the createChart function requires that you load some additional .NET assemblies, these are not part of the standard .NET 3.5 SP1 package, but are a Microsoft add-on, if you don’t have them installed on your machine when you run the code we need to handle that error.

When the script loads assembly the output of that operation is captured in the $assembly variable, if $assembly equals null, then nothing was loaded i.e. you don’t have the “System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization” assembly on you pc.  In this case my error handling code launches an internet explorer to the download page for the assembly and exits the script.

$assembly = [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization")
if($assembly -eq $null)
{
    Write-Host "Charting module not installed, please install it"
    # launch IE and navigate to the correct page
    $ie = New-Object -ComObject InternetExplorer.Application
    $ie.Navigate("http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=14422")
    $ie.Visible = $true
    break
}

Source

I’ve moved the source code for this project into GitHub and you can down load the source code here:

https://github.com/stevenaskwith/Focal-Lengths/blob/master/get-FocalLengths.ps1 click the “RAW” button and save as to grab a copy of the ps1.

Usage

Call the script in the same way as the previous version:

.\get-Focallengths –Path “c:\images” –fileType “.png” –model “Canon EOS 7D”

or drop the parameters you don’t need and let the script use it’s defaults e.g.

.\get-Focallengths –Path “c:\images”

Summary

Firing the script against my personal photo collection resulted in a nice graph shown below.  It’s quite obvious to see now that I either take my zoomed all the way in or out.  Now I’ve just got to pick where to spend my money…

THIS POSTING IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND INFERS NO WARRANTIES OR RIGHTS, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK