Chances are you’ve either fallen victim to camera theft, or know somebody who has. It’s enough to make your skin crawl knowing somebody has your awesome camera, not to mention the photos you worked so hard to acquire. But now there’s a solution: StolenCameraFinder.com.
Mike Richard of Vagabondish is the man who pointed us in the direction of this genius creation. How does it work? Every original photo taken with your digital camera includes hidden information about the image and the camera, such as model, make, and date. It also includes a unique serial number to identify your camera.
Once you drag and drop an original (important word here) photo from your camera onto the website page, StolenCameraFinder.com crawls the Internet searching for photos with the same serial number. So if suddenly you find a picture from a greasebag stranger with the same serial number, you know who has your camera.
We assume there are still a few kinks to work out, because after attempting the service ourselves, no results showed up…and our images are pretty widely spread out across the web. Just the same, it’s worth watching this site to see how it grows, and how useful it becomes. And what do you do when you find the person who has your camera? Well, that’s up to you. But please tell us about it.
We’ll leave you with a “little stolen camera win.” This chick featured on Lamebook stole some guy’s camera and then accidentally uploaded pictures of herself to his Facebook page…with her own phone featured in the background. America’s Dumbest Criminal, indeed.