stolencamerafinder.com

[harry_bee]

http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/intro.jsp

Just found this. Couldn't find it searching the forum posts so apologies if this is a repeat. Great idea - it searches exif data across the internet to match your serial number. Hopefully it will not be of use to anyone here..

[PaulatUKcamera]

Posted by Roger Mac on the 1st!

Paul

[gidstar]

I tried this method of tracing stolen cameras.....it didnt work. Sounds like a good idea though. Ive had loads of pictures published online, not one of them came up on the stolencamerafinder.com search and it wasnt very user friendly. So does it work for anyone? I'd be interested to find out....and if you nicked all my gear last April 2011...can I have it back now?

Thanks

Gideon

[jackrussell]

didn't work for me either. I have hundreds of shots online. The website says that this may be because they haven't indexed my pictures yet. How long will it take to index every photo on the internet? Apparently Facebook already has 100 Billion pictures posted. I presume many are from smartphones which prob dont have exif data. Does their sofware automatically ignore these files? Sounds like an excercise in painting the Forth bridge to me. Great idea tho.

[Alex1994]

According to a Facebook engineer, 200 million images are uploaded to FB every day!

He doesn't say how many are worth looking at!

http://www.quora.com/How-many-photos...ebook-each-day

[Barney]

Hopefully it will not be of use to anyone here.

I think they've missed a trick with the url. How people have their cameras stolen compared to those who have their images used without permission? It could be one way to track down unauthorised use of images on line. They allude to this in their pricing, but this would be the facility I would lead with if I were promoting it.

The advantage this has over TinEye is that it searches for any images taken by your camera, the advantage Tineye has is that it compares the image itself rather than the exif information (or so it claims.) Both systems fall down in the fact they don't seem to return any significant numbers of results, even when you know of other copies of an image being used online.

More worrying, when I searched one of my cameras, it returned a result for a Nikon D3100, and not the D300 it should have been. If it offered a free trial of pro services, it would be worth trying out, but the current free tool is pretty useless.

[jackrussell]

Pay for something that doesn't work when you trial it? No thanks. If they were to promote how they cope with the vast number of photographs uploaded each day, MAYBE I'd consider it.

JR