When you see that in the status bar, is everything in the image selected? You can have a general idea whether everything in the file is selected by looking at the bounding boxes. (The bounding box is the dashed line rectangle that you see around whatever you clicked on.)
"Group of 2 objects in Layer 1" means that there is one object selected, which is a Group, and that Group contains 2 objects. So if everything in the file is selected when you see that, then everything is in that group.
There's no way to know what kind of objects those 2 objects are, until you either ungroup, or select them individually. They could be groups as well, with many objects within those groups. Or they could be some other kind of object (such as Text, Path, Circle, etc.).
But I'm still not clear what the problem is. Is there some reason you need to know how many objects there are, at this point?
It sounds like you could just Ungroup, like you've done previously, and eventually you'll get down to paths (assuming the file has paths in it).
