$9,000 in stolen camera equipment recovered through Flickr search

When one professional photographer discovered that his expensive collection of cameras and lenses had gone missing on a shoot in Hollywood, he could have been out $9,000. Rather than giving up, John Heller, a Getty Images photog, smartly decided to put up a chase using a feature provided by GadgetTrak, a company that specializes in ferreting out stolen gadgets through GPS tracking.

GadgetTrak offers apps and software designed to track theft through GPS, but the company also has a new camera serial number search tool that crawls the web for any photos taken with a single camera. By typing in his camera's unique serial code, Heller was able to locate photos online that were linked to his long lost camera. 

Photographs posted to the web often include EXIF data, a kind of fingerprint that offers data about the shooting settings, like speed and aperture, but can also include device-specific info like a camera's serial number. While not all manufacturers embed the serial codes into EXIF data, many DSLRs support this feature — and those will set you back the most if they get stolen.

After finding a collection of photos on Flickr that matched his camera's serial number, Heller and the LAPD found that another photographer had unwittingly bought his stolen equipment, and the camera and lenses made it back into the right hands.

[via: BoingBoing]

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