Frequently Asked Questions

It's the focus distance that gives you the maximum depth of field for a given focal length and aperture — everything from half that distance to infinity appears acceptably sharp.

Smaller sensors need a smaller circle of confusion to look equally sharp when viewed at the same size, which changes the depth of field for the same focal length and aperture.

It's a close, industry-standard approximation. For critical work, treat the results as a starting point rather than an exact guarantee.

One stop is a doubling or halving of the light reaching your sensor — one full click on most aperture, shutter speed, or ISO dials.

Light passes through a lens opening, so it scales with area, not diameter — that’s why the f-number needs to change more than shutter speed or ISO to represent the same one-stop change.

Yes — set ‘Change’ to Shutter Speed and pick a faster speed, then choose Aperture or ISO to compensate with, and the calculator gives you the exact value that keeps the same brightness.

It depends on how fast your subject moves — clouds and sunsets often work well around 3–10 seconds, while very slow scenes (construction, plant growth) may use minutes between shots. Start with the video duration you want and let this calculator work backward from there.

Video duration depends on both your total shots and your chosen frame rate — the same number of shots plays back faster (and shorter) at 60fps than at 24fps.

It’s the traditional film-industry standard where your shutter speed is exactly half your frame interval, producing motion blur that looks natural to viewers. This calculator’s shutter angle result tells you how close your settings are to that look.

The 500 rule only considers focal length and crop factor. The NPF rule also accounts for your aperture and your camera’s pixel pitch, which is why two cameras with the same focal length but different resolutions get different NPF results.

The NPF rule is generally considered more accurate, especially on modern high-megapixel cameras, since smaller pixels make star trailing visible at shorter exposure times than the simple 500 rule assumes.

Pick the resolution preset closest to your camera’s actual megapixel count; the listed example models can help you match it.

Three frames at ±1 stop is often enough for an ordinary scene. For high-contrast scenes like backlighting or sunsets, widen the step (±2 stops) or add more frames (7 or 9) to cover a wider brightness range.

For static scenes on a tripod (like landscapes), shutter-speed bracketing is most common, since depth of field stays identical across frames. For handheld shots or scenes with movement, ISO bracketing can be worth considering instead.

Long-exposure bracketing (for example, night landscapes) stretches each frame's exposure time, so a full bracket can take much longer than expected. This helps you plan around how long a tripod needs to stay in position, or how much a scene's light might shift during the sequence.

It uses the exact same formulas, but shows every standard aperture's hyperfocal distance, and every preset subject distance's near/far limits, in table form instead of one result at a time.

Hyperfocal distance depends only on focal length, aperture, and sensor size (via the circle of confusion) — not on how far away your subject is.

Yes — choose "Custom" under Sensor Size and enter your own circle of confusion value in millimeters.

It's mainly useful as a sanity check, for manual-exposure film cameras without a working meter, or when you want a fast starting point before fine-tuning.

Each stop of the aperture roughly corresponds to a lighting condition letting in about half as much light as the one before it, so the rule widens the aperture by one stop per condition to keep the same shutter speed reasonable.

Pick the aperture that gives you a shutter speed close to what you want — since the underlying math is stop-for-stop, you can also work backward from a target shutter speed using our exposure triangle calculator.

Golden hour runs while the sun's altitude is between about -0.83° and +6° above the horizon; blue hour runs between about -6° and -0.83°. Both the length and timing of each window vary by date and location.

This calculator is a lightweight design that doesn't use a time-zone database — it displays the computed times in this device's (browser's) own current time zone. That's accurate for your immediate surroundings when you use "Use my location," but if you manually enter coordinates for a completely different time zone, the times shown reflect this device's time zone rather than the local time at that location.

No. Your latitude and longitude are only used for the calculation in your browser — they're never sent or stored anywhere. The "Use my location" button simply uses your browser's standard location permission prompt.

No — you can enter latitude and longitude manually and use the calculator without granting location permission at all.

It's the narrowest aperture (smallest f-number) past which diffraction becomes the main thing softening fine detail in a photo, for a given sensor size. Stopping down further still deepens depth of field, but at the cost of increasingly visible softening.

It depends on the circle of confusion, which is based on sensor size (via the same values our DoF calculator uses) — a smaller sensor has a smaller circle of confusion, so diffraction becomes visible at a wider aperture (a lower f-number) than on a larger sensor.

Not necessarily — depth of field is often more important to the final image than the small amount of softening near the diffraction limit. It matters most when you need maximum resolved detail, such as large prints or heavy crops.

They use the same underlying formula, but this page is built around the field-of-view angle itself (useful when you need to know exactly how wide a shot will be), while the crop-factor calculator is built around comparing equivalent focal lengths and apertures across sensor sizes.

Horizontal and vertical FOV describe how wide and how tall the frame is, using the sensor's width and height respectively. Diagonal FOV (using the sensor's diagonal measurement) is the single number most commonly quoted for a lens's overall angle of view, since it doesn't depend on whether the camera is held horizontally or vertically.

Yes — select "Custom" under Sensor Size and enter your camera's exact sensor width and height in millimeters, which you can usually find in its manufacturer specifications.

It's in the flash's manual or manufacturer spec sheet, usually listed at ISO 100 for a specific zoom head position (often 35mm or 50mm equivalent). If your flash has a zoom head, the guide number changes at each zoom setting — use the value for whatever zoom position you're actually shooting at.

A higher ISO makes the sensor more sensitive to the same amount of light, which is equivalent to boosting the flash's effective reach — but only by the square root of the ISO ratio, not proportionally. Doubling ISO increases the usable guide number (and distance) by about 41%, not 100%.

No — guide numbers assume direct, undiffused flash in open conditions. Bouncing the flash off a ceiling or wall, or adding a diffuser/softbox, reduces the effective light reaching your subject, so you'll typically need a wider aperture or closer distance than this calculator suggests.

Not always. 300 DPI is a common benchmark for prints viewed up close (albums, framed photos), but large posters or banners viewed from a distance can look plenty sharp at around 150 DPI. The farther the viewing distance, the lower the DPI you need.

No. If the shortfall is small (an upscale factor of 1.3x or less in the advanced section), ordinary resizing is often enough, and an AI upscaler is a solid option beyond that. Re-shooting or choosing a smaller print size is really only worth recommending once the factor passes about 2x.

Photo print sizes (4×6, 8×10, etc.) are the inch-based sizes common at photo labs, while sizes like A4/A3 are ISO standard sizes used for office and general printing. This calculator offers both as presets, plus a 'Custom' option for anything else.

Use RAW if you plan to do significant editing afterward, or JPEG if you need ready-to-use results right away. If your camera saves both formats at once, add the two file sizes together and enter that total with the 'Custom' option.

A common rule of thumb is at least 2–3 total copies including the original (for example: camera original + external drive + cloud). Entering 1 in the advanced 'Extra Backup Copies' field calculates storage for 2 total copies including the original.

This calculator assumes your entered upload speed holds steady the whole time, which is a theoretical estimate. Real-world uploads often take longer due to network congestion, Wi-Fi conditions, or the cloud service's own processing speed.

Correct. Everything runs as JavaScript inside your own browser — it reads and rebuilds the file locally with no network request involved. You can verify this yourself in your browser's developer tools Network tab.

No. This tool doesn't re-compress the image at all — it only cuts out the byte ranges where metadata is stored, leaving the original pixel data completely untouched.

Turn on the 'Remove GPS location only' checkbox in Advanced Options — for JPEG files, this strips just the GPS coordinates while leaving camera model, lens, and shooting settings intact.

It's the ratio between the sensor's diagonal length and a full-frame (36×24mm) sensor's diagonal (about 43.3mm). This closely matches the crop factors manufacturers officially quote (e.g. 1.5x for APS-C, 2.0x for Micro Four Thirds).

It calculates the actual hyperfocal distance, near/far limits, and total depth of field for the sensor, focal length, aperture, and subject distance you entered. The circle-of-confusion value used is a standard approximation based on the sensor diagonal, so real-world results can vary with print size and viewing distance.

Depth of field and background blur are governed by the lens's actual physical aperture diameter, not the f-number alone. When the field of view is matched across different sensor sizes, the f-number that produces the same apparent depth of field scales with the ratio of the two sensors' crop factors.

Nikon documents this field (ShutterCount) as a plain, unencrypted number inside its MakerNote block, which we've independently verified against real camera files. Canon publishes the storage location for a handful of recent EOS R bodies — the R5, R6, R6 Mark II, R8, and R50 — so we support those too. Other manufacturers (Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax) either don't store an equivalent value in the file at all, or store it in a way that varies by model and needs separate work per camera — we're expanding brand support gradually.

Yes, for a handful of models. Currently supported: the EOS R5, EOS R6, EOS R6 Mark II, EOS R8, and EOS R50 (CR3 files only). Unlike Nikon, Canon stores this value at a different byte location for nearly every camera model, and a publicly documented location currently exists only for those five bodies. Every other Canon camera, old or new, isn't mapped yet — we'll add more as documented locations become available.

Both. In-camera JPEGs carry the same MakerNote data as NEF files, as long as they haven't been re-saved or edited by another program (which typically strips or rewrites this metadata).

No. The file is read and parsed entirely in your browser using JavaScript — it's never sent to any server, matching how every other tool on ExifLens handles your files.

No. Everything is processed inside your browser and your photos are not sent anywhere. Processed images disappear when you close the tab, so download the results you need.

At a JPG or WebP quality of about 70 to 85, the difference is hard to see on screen. If you need a smaller file than that, reducing the maximum width usually harms quality less than lowering quality further.

PNG is a lossless format, so a quality value cannot shrink it. For photos, switch the output format to JPG or WebP, or reduce the maximum width. A transparent PNG saved as JPG gets a white background where it was transparent.

Depending on the photo, even the lowest quality may not reach the target, and a notice appears. Reduce the maximum width or raise the target a little and try again.

By default EXIF and GPS are removed. Only when saving a JPG as a JPG can you keep everything or remove only the location. If hiding location is all you need, the EXIF Remover tool also works.