Last week I was made aware of a new service being provided by the folks at GadgetTrak. Their core business involves software solutions used to locate and track hardware devices (for example, to track a stolen laptop). Last week they announced a new service that indexes photos across the web based on camera serial number. As a photographer, the idea is that one could enter the serial number of their camera and see everywhere that photos from that camera are being displayed on the public internet. It sounds like a good way that one could do a bit of copyright policing if one was so inclined.
I went to the GadgetTrak Camera Serial Search site and put in three serial numbers from my three most-used cameras (Canon and Nikon DSLRs which are about 5 years old, 3 years old, and 6 months old). Zero results were returned. I know that I’ve posted over 6,000 images publicly from these cameras to sites such as Flickr, SmugMug, and a variety of smaller or self-hosted locations. I dropped a quick message to my contact at GadgetTrak and was told that they’re still indexing. They indicate they’ve indexed almost three million serial numbers but that there are billions of images to go as they create a more complete index.
The service sounds like a great idea, and perhaps at some point it will be more useful, but until their index grows bigger to encompass more images from more cameras, it sounds like a service that I’m only going to find interesting in theory.
Update 6/9 15:00: After chatting with someone from GadgetTrak, apparently the reason why I can’t find my photos is that the serial number is missing. Given that I’m using standard software (Lightroom, Photoshop) and not explicitly removing any metadata, we’re going to investigate what’s going on. If my serial numbers are being stripped without my knowledge, I can’t help but wonder how many others are in the same situation. I’ll post a followup after we do some research.
