CameraTrace Traces Stolen Cameras

CameraTrace might help you trace your camera CameraTrace is a service that will help you track down your stolen or lost camera. It does this by scanning popular photo-sharing sites like Flickr and extracting camera serial numbers from the EXIF metadata contained in the photos. Then, when your camera goes missing, you use CameraTrace to track down any photos taken with it. If these images also have GPS coordinates embedded in them, you're golden. If not, you'll need to do a little detective work to track things down. Despite just launching publicly, CameraTrace has already had some success through its test and data-gathering stages. One photographer apparently recovered $9,000 worth of gear. The service costs $10 per camera to register, and the price includes a bar-coded security tag to stick on the camera itself. There is an option to try a “free trace,” but I had no luck with any of my cameras (one isn't supported, apparently, but the other one certainly is). After it didn't find anything, the tool offered me the option of signing up to better, future results. This feels sneaky to me: if the service has a database of all Flickr photo serial numbers, why wouldn't mine show up? And ironically, the easiest way for me to extract the serial number from my photos to test CameraTrace was to drag-and-drop a picture into the site of a rival service, Stolen Camera Finder, which does the same kind of thing only in a much friendlier way. Still, if it helps to get your camera back, $10 is a small price to pay. CameraTrace product page [CameraTrace]

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