# Quickly get general stats about Artifact

**URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/quickly-get-general-stats-about-artifact/172
**Category:** User Support
**Created:** [December 9, 2016, 10:01pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/quickly-get-general-stats-about-artifact/172 "2016-12-09T22:01:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![lkursell](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/lkursell/32/19952_2.png) [@lkursell](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/lkursell)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2016, 10:01pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/quickly-get-general-stats-about-artifact/172/1 "2016-12-09T22:01:57Z")

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I want to compare the sequences in my `FeatureData[AlignedSequences]` compared to after I run `alignment.methods.mask(aligned_seqs)`. The long unpleasant way would seem to be to convert the Artifact to some `skbio` format and then count sequences - is there a shorter path?

e.g.

`aligned_seqs = qiime.Artifact.load('aligned_seqs.qza') filtered_aligned_seqs = alignment.methods.mask(aligned_seqs)`

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### Author: ![jairideout](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/jairideout/32/9_2.png) [@jairideout](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/jairideout)
#### Post date: [December 12, 2016, 7:14pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/quickly-get-general-stats-about-artifact/172/2 "2016-12-12T19:14:55Z")

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Hi @lkursell! Right now there isn't a convenient way to do this. We've thought it might be useful to implement some sort of plugin API to generate a summary of an artifact's data (probably placed in metadata.yml). I created [an issue](https://github.com/qiime2/qiime2/issues/197) to track progress on this feature.

In the meantime, the approach you described should work, or you could extract the raw data from your .qza file. You can use `qiime tools export`, `qiime tools extract`, or unzip manually to get at the raw data (it'll be in a `data` subdirectory).