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Saturday, 25 June 2011

SnapHow.com : Web & Computing Tips

Find Stolen Camera Online: Search Uploaded Photos Having Same EXIF

Posted: 25 Jun 2011 10:00 AM PDT

Getting back a stolen object, like a laptop or a camera is hard, but thanks to modern-day technology you have useful tools to find the person who’s been using your stolen digital camera to take photos and uploading it.

Whenever you take a photo with your digital camera, the JPEG image has some info. as meta data about both the photo’s origin and the camera such as the camera model, date & time etc. This information, called EXIF data, and most of the times it also includes the serial number which uniquely identifies your digital camera.

For Example : I checked the iconic "Situation Room" photo at Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer and found out that a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with Serial No. 520303004 took that historic photograph.

So basically this means that any photo found on the web with this serial no. in the EXIF meta data, could have been shot with that same camera used to take that situation room picture. (unless of course someone changed it deliberately with an exif editor).

But if you are lucky that the thief is nooby or the person who bought it doesn’t change the exif data on the photos taken with your camera and uploads it’s on the web like Flickr etc, then you search for those photos can try to find the uploader.

► Stolen Camera Finder <Link> crawls and scours the internet searching for photos, collecting the serial numbers of the digital cameras used to take them. If you have a raw photo taken with that stolen camera earlier, then you can upload this photo to this site and it tries match them with the camera’s serial number of your photo with the ones in their database.

You can also search its database manually with the serial number of the package box of your digital camera. If if they don’t find the results immediately you can subscribe to their missing camera report so that they can notify you by email as soon as they find a photo with the serial number matching your camera’s.

In case if you have deleted the photos from your pc you can retrieve deleted files, images with software or you can recover the photos from memory card, if you have the old one with you.

Tip : Easily Apply Color Correction to Enhance Your Digital Photos