What photo-sharing websites expose camera serial numbers?

Question

What websites expose the camera body serial numbers from the original image EXIF?

Flickr is a photo sharing website that exposes lots of photo metadata (from the EXIF data) and even make it easy to access thanks to the Flickr API. Google's Picasaweb also offers some information from the EXIF but not the serial number.

Are there any other sites that may help me?

As a bit of background on what I'm doing, I'm trying to collate a database of camera serial numbers and the URLs of the images where they were found. This is just me doing something for free in the hope that we can catch some of the people that steal our precious cameras! I hope this isn't too off-topic as I'm not trying to sell anything, just trying to do some good!

Disclaimer: I'm the author of stolencamerafinder ;)

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Update - As requested by fbuchinger, here's a quick update to the project status:

Many sites (including facebook unfortunately) strip the makernotes out of the EXIF. So far, I've found the richest source of serial numbers to be Flickr. I suppose it's because people often upload full-size (read "unedited") images. On my site (stolencamerafinder.com) I offer a java webstart app that harvests flickr data through its API. Since there is a cap on the rate at which I make API calls, I've written it so that the work is shared between the number of web start clients, thus reducing bandwidth and CPU on the clients the more people that run it. If you're reading this and you have, say, admin access to a server at work that doesn't do much, why not leave it running on there ;)

I have also written a Google Chrome plugin that just keeps an eye out for images on websites that have a serial number embedded. I don't expect a very high yield from this app, the main idea was to discover what websites may be good sources to write bespoke spidering tools for and then crawl them.

I've publicised my API for stolencamerafinder and am looking for other programmers to help me write programs that may serve as web crawlers.

I've collected lots of interesting data in doing this project that I will put on the website soon such as which camera models do and don't write useful serial numbers. The Nikon D50 for example just writes "D50" as its serial number!

I would be extremely grateful for any feedback (good or bad!) you may have on my project.

-Matt

Answer 1

I love the idea of a thief-catcher. ;)

I have noticed that DeviantArt.com seems to "capture" all of the EXIF metadata that is embedded in any uploaded images. It does not show all of it, however there are some parts of the site (many of them only for paying members) that show more detailed information about an uploaded image, and I've seen full tag data listed.

I guess, technically speaking, if you could do something similar to TinEye.com (Reverse Image Search) that indexes images and searches by content similarity. TinEye is handy in that it matches images by content, but it has its limitations. Photomanipulations created with someones copyrighted photo are difficult to identify. Searching by serial number would provide an alternative, complimentary approach.

You could technically get any exif data that is embedded in the images uploaded to the Internet. If the camera serial number is embedded, you would have what you are looking for. You would need to scrape a copy of each image from the sites you index, extract any EXIF (or other tag data) from the indexed images, and track the information with a link back to the source. You could probably also use major search engines like Bing and Google to find images to index (basic keyword image searches, such as photographer names, locations, etc. might be sufficient.) You probably wouldn't need to keep the image around (and doing so might involve legal issues anyway), but at least you would have an index of EXIF/IPTC tag data, possibly a serial number, and a source link.

Answer 2

UPDATE:

Thanks for the project status update! First of all the approach with the java webstart app is interesting - do you use different flickr api keys for each webstart instance or does flickr cap the api requests based on a api key/ip-address combination?

I ran your webstart app and it yielded 0 serial numbers after scanning 50 photos. I haven't looked at your source code, but you should be aware that only a tiny minority of cams (mostly dslrs) write serial numbers into the exif metadata.

I'd recommend to download the sample images from Phil Harvey's Meta Information Repository and run exiftool on it to see which models actually yield serial numbers. You can then narrow down your webstart app search to these models and thus improve the success ratio highly.

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I stumbled upon your question when I just started to explore photo.stackexchange.com.

2 years ago, I had a very similar idea to stolencamerafinder and actually started implementing it in python. However I stoped it due to various reasons:

• The most of the camera serialnumbers stored in the EXIF data are editable and thus fakeable (at least with exiftool) --> risk of false alerts or "serial number spam" (at least when the service starts to get popular)

• Most people use image uploaders that resize their images and thereby often discard all or many parts of the EXIF data (Remember that the serialnumber is always stored in some proprietary exif makernote that is often dropped during image conversions) --> low ratio of inspected images: extracted serial numbers.

however I'm curious how your project has developed... could you give a short status summary?

Answer 3

As my first answer is more focused on technical details, I decided to open a second answer to give you some overview on my original "camerafinder" idea dubbed "C.A.T.T." (Camera Anti Theft Tool). Feel free to use my ideas, but please credit me proberly...

Contrary to stolencamerafinder, C.A.T.T. works on an opt-in-basis. As the owner of a camera, you sign up at the C.A.T.T. site, create a user profile and then register your cameras.

To do so, you are required to take a picture of some randomly generated QRCode displayed on the screen. Then you upload the unmodified photo to the C.A.T.T. site. When the upload is complete, the server reads the metadata of the photo and checks for an embedded serial number. It also tries to decode the QRCode from the picture and compares it against a stored hash. This is to prevent that somebody can register your camera by just uploading an arbitrary photo taken with that camera.

When your camera gets stolen, you login at the C.A.T.T. site and mark that device as stolen. To trace the stolen cameras, we planned a client-side exif serial number parser in javascript as mozilla greasemonkey script (similar to your chrome extension). It should only execute on flickr pages containing original images (thanks to greasemonkey's url pattern support) in order not to slow down the browser too much. The script would contact the C.A.T.T. server on a regular basis to fetch a list of stolen cam serials. If the serial of the currently displayed image shows a match, it would display an alert.

I saw that your chrome extension follows a similar approach (although it just seems to collect the serials). In your case I would leverage the extension with the W3C File Api (currently Firefox and Chrome), so that the user can also inspect locally stored photos and not just those embedded in webpages. This will surely increase your "serial number harvest", because no "man-in-the-middle" (flickr facebook etc) will strip out the exif data.

Here is an interesting Mozilla demo on Exif Extraction with the W3C File API.