Have you ever lost an electronic device, like a phone or Camera, the chances of getting them back are negligible, if you’ve got them back, you are few of the lucky ones. We’ve found a great way to find and track lost/stolen Camera and the person using them.
Whenever you click a photo with your digital camera, the JPEG image has some information called metadata(data about data) about both the photo’s origin and the camera such as the camera model, date & time, Location, etc. This information, called EXIF data, most of the times it also includes the serial number which uniquely identifies your digital camera.
We did some test for this, We check the Situation Room‘s EXIF information with Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer and found out that a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with Serial No. 520303004 took that historic photograph.
This means that any photograph found on the internet with this Serial Number in the EXIF Meta could have been shot with the same camera, unless, of-course someone changed it deliberately with an exif editor).
If you are lucky enough and the thief doesn’t have any knowledge of it, he doesn’t change the EXIF Metadata on the photos taken with your camera and uploads it on the web like Flickr, etc, you can search for the pictures and try and find the person who has uploaded it.
HOW to find Stolen Camera via the EXIF Metadata?
With the Stolen Camera Finder, it crawls though the internet searching for photos, collecting the serial numbers of the digital cameras used to take them. If you have a raw photo that was previously taken with the camera when you had it earlier, you can upload this photo to Stolen Camera Finder’s site and relax while it tries and match them with the camera’s serial number of your photo with the ones in their database.