How This Photographer Recovered US$9000 Worth Of Stolen Gear
By Mario Aguilar on August 25, 2011 at 9:54 am
Professional photographer John Heller got $US9000 worth of gear stolen in Los Angeles. Heres how he got it all back.
Heller, a Getty Images photographer, was on assignment at the Egyptian theatre in Hollywood when his Nikon D3 and bag of lenses was stolen. Like most victims of gadget theft, Heller reported the crime to the police but resigned himself to the loss. In a last ditch, he entered his cameras serial number into GadgetTraks Serial Search Service and turned up an exact match to several photos that had recently been posted to Flickr. These photos eventually led Heller and the police to a professional photographer whod unwittingly bought the stolen gear. The Flickr account even lead them to the photographers Facebook profile which had snapshots of the missing lenses.
So how does the GadgetTrak search work? Buried within each digital photo file are vast troves EXIF data which includes exposure settings, the type of camera that used to take the photo, and most importantly in this case, the cameras serial number. When you upload your photo to Flickr, or any other photo-sharing site, all of this data goes with it. Searching photos by this data is easy enough unless theyre hidden behind a privacy setting. GadgetTrak claims that its search spiders have located and indexed more than 10 million camera serial numbers. It seems so simple that its hard to believe Hellers the first person to recover their camera by searching for their serial number on Flickr.
[GadgetTrak via BoingBoing]
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/08/how-this-photographer-recovered-us9000-worth-of-stolen-gear/
By Mario Aguilar on August 25, 2011 at 9:54 am
Professional photographer John Heller got $US9000 worth of gear stolen in Los Angeles. Heres how he got it all back.
Heller, a Getty Images photographer, was on assignment at the Egyptian theatre in Hollywood when his Nikon D3 and bag of lenses was stolen. Like most victims of gadget theft, Heller reported the crime to the police but resigned himself to the loss. In a last ditch, he entered his cameras serial number into GadgetTraks Serial Search Service and turned up an exact match to several photos that had recently been posted to Flickr. These photos eventually led Heller and the police to a professional photographer whod unwittingly bought the stolen gear. The Flickr account even lead them to the photographers Facebook profile which had snapshots of the missing lenses.
So how does the GadgetTrak search work? Buried within each digital photo file are vast troves EXIF data which includes exposure settings, the type of camera that used to take the photo, and most importantly in this case, the cameras serial number. When you upload your photo to Flickr, or any other photo-sharing site, all of this data goes with it. Searching photos by this data is easy enough unless theyre hidden behind a privacy setting. GadgetTrak claims that its search spiders have located and indexed more than 10 million camera serial numbers. It seems so simple that its hard to believe Hellers the first person to recover their camera by searching for their serial number on Flickr.
[GadgetTrak via BoingBoing]
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/08/how-this-photographer-recovered-us9000-worth-of-stolen-gear/
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