You’ve just taken a dozens of images you were planning to sell or add to your website when you suddenly realize that you don’t have your camera. Has it been lost or stolen? Then you’re thinking of all the pictures on your camera: what will the people that stole it or found your camera do with them? Will they simply delete them, or will the pictures end up on the web, possibly Photoshopped in some undesirable way? Then you’re thinking why the industry hasn’t introduced passwords on consumer cameras, or a function that will self-destruct the camera, or something like a Lo-Jack for cameras, or a camera finder of any kind…

So you can’t remotely delete the photos and you can’t destroy the camera. The next best thing is to use stolen camera finder. All you have to do is drag and drop one of the images you had taken with the camera previously onto the page and the site will show search results of other images that have been taken with the exact same camera. This service works by using Exif data embedded within your photo to search the web for photos taken with the same camera.

If you don’t have any photos handy that have been taken with the stolen camera, you can also type your camera’s ‘internal’ serial number if you have it (usually not the one on the box) into a search box to see who’s posting pictures with your camera. Exif is a standard used by digital cameras and other electronics and may also include your camera’s ‘internal’ serial number. This may be a long shot, and if your camera isn’t listed, this tool won’t work. It also won’t work searching on Facebook or MySpace because they scrape the Exif info from the photos according to the site.

(To see the actual data your current camera embeds within your photos, try Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer.)

See what can happen if you have an Eye-Fi card installed in your lost/stolen camera.

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