AI can help camera admin...

I have a fairly advanced case of "Gear Acquisition Syndrome", which has led to me owning two Canon camera bodies (which I use a lot) and - gulp - 11 Canon lenses (some of which I don't use anywhere near enough).

One of this morning's little jobs was to upgrade the camera bodies to the latest version of firmware, released this week. While a lot of Canon lenses go their whole production run on their release firmware, there are sometimes updates to fix bugs or improve performance. I'm sure the other lens manufacturers do the same thing. Checking up on all the lenses is a dull chore, but I decided to make sure everything was properly up to date.

There's an IT management theory that says you should give repetitive tasks to the laziest engineer, as they'll figure out a way to automate the job, making it much easier to do in future. I'm lazy, so I decided to enlist my AI assistant to do the hard work for me.

I created a spreadsheet with columns for mount type, lens name, firmware version and release date, leaving the last two columns empty. I uploaded the spreadsheet to Claude AI (the free tier) and gave it the following prompt:

Attached is a Numbers spreadsheet containing rows for all my Canon camera lenses. Can you find for each lens the current firmware version number and the date the firmware was released and add that info to the spreadsheet?

Claude worked surprisingly hard on this. It loaded a module to read and write Numbers spreadsheets, went down the list and politely corrected a couple of typos I'd made in the lens names, and searched several websites for the information (after it struggled to understand the Javascript formatting of the official Canon website). It compiled all the information, and presented me with an updated spreadsheet with the firmware columns filled in.

I did consider getting Claude to write a program to let me do this on demand, but I was impressed with the creative way it sought out multiple information sources. Instead, I can now upload the spreadsheet to Claude in the future and give it a different prompt:

Attached is a Numbers spreadsheet containing rows for all my Canon camera lenses. Can you check for each lens whether there is a newer firmware version than the one listed in the spreadsheet. If there is, update the spreadsheet and give me a link to download the newer firmware file.

Being lazy isn't always a bad thing!