Stolen Camera Finder is a web-based search service that looks for your stolen camera’s serial number in the metadata of images online.
Every photo you take with your digital camera contains hidden information about both the image and the camera such as the make, model and date. This information, called exif data, can also include a unique serial number which identifies your camera.
stolencamerafinder crawls the internet searching for photos, collecting the serial numbers of the cameras that took them.
Kudos to programmer Matt Burns for developing this search engine. He even developed a plugin for the Google Chrome browser that will analyze the images on each web page you surf and help build the search engine’s database. If you want to help out a fellow photographer, you can download the plugin here.
[via PetaPixel]
wow! this website is awesome! they just need to increase the database! that’s it!
WOW!!! What great info! This will perhaps stop so much theft! Thank you!
I tried to drag a picture into the box but all I got was that the picture would open up in a new page but not go onto your site. So if this will work my camera was an Olympus C-5050 Zoom and I have the registration card which says the serial # is 242123320. This low life stole my camera and all the backups I had of images of my work, plus he stole a piece of my work! All I have left are the pictures on my website, which is less than half of the total I had.
WOW….this is the best news Ive heard in a long time!
THANK YOU!
Nice! my camera has never been stolen but this is still cool just knowing it is out there. I guess time will tell if this app can actually help people recover their cameras. I installed the plug in on my browser. I hope it helps someone find out where their camera is.
Pity it doesn’t work for SONY dslr range – maybe SONY will do a firmware update for all their digital range of cameras to help with this.
that is awesome to know that too
i dont get it… how do you drag a photo onto it from another site?!?!! someone explain please