Photographer Has $15k In Gear Stolen, Uses EXIF Data To Nail the Thief
Jul 9, 2015
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
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Being robbed is like a punch to the stomach. Seeing someone making money with your stolen possessions and not being able to do anything about it is just a swift kick to the gonads.
That’s exactly what Australian photographer Jon Grundy experienced when a daredevil photographer [name removed] broke into Grundy’s home and stole $15k worth of gear. The thief then used the gear to shoot photos that he offered for sale online in addition to garnering much media attention from his dangerous exploits. But, one thing the thief hadn’t counted on was that each of his photos was meta-tagged with the name of the photographer from whom he stole.
It all started a year ago in July 2014 when Grundy posted a couple lenses for sale online. He was contacted by the thief who showed interest in the gear, but the sale fell through with the thief stating he didn’t “have enough money to buy it tonight.” However, that was not before Grundy had given his address so they could complete the transaction.
A few days later, Grundy’s wife came home to find that their house had been burgled and that all of her husband’s camera equipment had been stolen. Yet, with no proof indisputably linking the “sale call” to the crime, Grundy could only speculate as to who the culprit really was.
Grundy kept a watchful eye on [name removed] online presence. Shortly after the break-in, he posted an image on Instagram bragging about some recently-acquired camera gear that Grundy thought looked extremely familiar. But there was still no proof.
It wasn’t until October 2014 that a photographer working with [name removed] began noticing the name “Jon Grundy” in the metadata of his images. When asked about it, [name removed] joked that the gear was stolen. (“Many truths are said in jest…”) Unlike his colleague, the photographer had a conscience and contacted Grundy to inquire as to whether or not he was missing any gear, particularly a Canon 5D Mark III. This new information led to the thief ‘s arrest on charges of burglary and handling stolen goods, and the equipment was returned to its rightful owner.
In February, the thief unrepentantly pled guilty to the charges, but no conviction is documented as being handed down. For all of his misdeeds, he only received 100 hours of community service. (Talk about a deterrent to crime…)
How To Add Copyright Information To Photos
To be honest, before this, I had never even thought about customizing in-camera metadata. But, on most newer dSLR cameras, it’s rather simple to do through the menu screen.
Canon Cameras
- Switch your camera to manual mode (this gives you the greatest selection of menu options).
- Open the menu, and scroll over to your yellow settings icons.
- Select Copyright Information > Enter author’s name to update your name and Copyright information > Enter copyright details to update any additional details, using the dial or buttons to select the characters one at a time.
(Read more instructions here and here.)
Nikon Cameras
- Go into your menu and select Setup Menu > Copyright information.
- From here you can set both your name and additional copyright information.
- Select Attach Copyright Information to make sure it’s added to your images.
(Read more instruction here.)
Something that seems so trivial, especially when you can mass update EXIF information in Lightroom, can be a game-changer in the long run. Not only could this be used to track down stolen gear, but careless photo-stealers might overlook this valuable information as well.
How about you?
Have any of you had a similar experience? Did metadata play a part in helping you recover stolen gear or proving ownership of your images?
[via Reddit]
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
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45 responses to “Photographer Has $15k In Gear Stolen, Uses EXIF Data To Nail the Thief”
what would be great is if we can set the copyright and owner info and password it, which remains locked unless the rightful owner disables it. just a thought..
I was thinking the same thing. Good train of thought.
Fortunately, most thieves are not that bright.
Right? Once a week you have to log in or else it stays locked. Or in the future when they’re fully ‘Smart Cameras’ to have something like Android Device manager that you can lock / reset remotely.
In that case all you’d have to do is reload the firmware and everything is reset
What a piece of shit.
You guys should check out more of his tweets. This Wilson is an idiot and indeed an a$$hole. He actually feels he’s the victim when this news piece was brought up…
His photos are also mediocre at best for someone who breaks the law to get to uniquely high places. Meh.
Thanks for informing thieves to delete exif data.. idiots.
Thanks for informing victims how to track down stolen gears. Idiot.
it’s not the victim who found out exif data, it is the honest second hand buyer. idiot.
Equipment was stolen from photographers covering USC Football at the LA Colosseum media room the past two years. Sucks to have your gear stolen even if recovered.
Jordan Bunce
Soooooo set meta data RIGHT NOW got it hahaha
The serial number of the camera cannot be changed (might be Nikon factories has something for it). -> http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/
This guy acts like a DICK on his Instagram
Unfortunately the thieves now know what to do if they steal a camera.
But thanks to several posts here, photographers now know how to put identifying information into their exif files. I also didn’t know about Stolen Camera Finder, lenstag, etc..
Would also advise all photogs to register all gear on lenstag (its free)
Thank you for this.
You can register all your gear using Lenstag ( https://www.lenstag.com/ ), which will alert you whenever a photo taken with your gear is found online. They even have apps that let you take photos of the gear for serial number verification.
Finding photos online relies on an extension you can install in your browser, so the more people use it, the more effective it is.
Yes yes! Lenstag does a superb job. Wish everyone was on it.
Thank you fot this information, i had no idea about this!!
It would be nice to have a search engine to search the web for data (serial numbers) in exifs only. Would be easy to find not just cameras, but certain type of photos.
So, wouldn’t all the pictures Wilson shot be legally copyrighted to Grundy? That would be sweet justice.
My understanding, in the United States at least, is its the act of taking the picture that establishes the copyright. So the stranger you hand your camera to on vacation to so you can get in the shot, nominally has the copyright on your vacation picture.
Correct! The monkey and Bradley Cooper are the copyright holders.
US Copyright info. http://copyright.gov/title17/
We moved offices a few years ago and I set up a time-lapse of both the move-out, and in. One of my move-out cameras was stolen, but I had images set to download to my laptop, thankfully a cheap dell. You can see a person keep looking at the camera and then the last few images he gets closer and closer and then the camera is gone!
Totally sucks.
NO password on settings….waste of time!
With camera’s now having GPS in them you can also track where the camera was last used. My big boy camera auto updates when around wifi the GPS locations to the images I shoot on google earth so if the camera gets stolen I can see where it was last used. Saved my butt with a crappy roommate who robed me.
100 hrs. of community service?? Don’t know what to say about that. I wasn’t that lucky about 4 yrs.ago when my laptop and only back up hard drives and a camera lens was stolen. Lost a large chunk of my images including irreplaceable photos of my travels and personal portraits.
I have a older Canon that doesn’t have the © info set up. But at least you can create this info in Photoshop and Lightroom. Live and learn from experience. Cloud services and hard drives are your main forms of back up.
He actually wrote this shit on his website “Some work, others play, many steal.”
Copyright is a kind of IPTC metadata, not EXIF metadata. IPTC is customizable, EXIF is not (although some tools are available to software developers that can edit EXIF, but that is an exception).
Thank you
Thank you for the return
Thanks for sharing this.. I had did this ages ago for my 60D but somehow forgot to do the same on my 5D.
You can always just use something like MAT to remove all the metadata from everything and scrub it clean. Lots of people have them like this one I see it a lot on reddit. https://mat.boum.org/
The greatest thing is you cant change the equipment’s serial number, and it is in the EXIF every photo
I had a camera stolen and found out the thief in two days, thanks to surveillance cameras in the coffee shop and Facebook friends. The thing is, the thief changed the copyright info inside my camera to his name. Anyway, one of the things that I did to was to register my serial number in this website http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/ where just uploading a picture taken with your camera registers his serial number, then if the website finds a picture with your serial number it reports to you.
I have had my gear stolen in past, it was insured so I am back. I wanted to search the Internet for exif data, does anyone know of a way to search for exif?
I don’t know if this has been previously mentioned, but meet at a public place like Starbucks when doing transactions.
that is a very nice way of doing it . to bad they dont low-jack them to your Iphone or Ipad ….
Lenstag will track your photos online too https://www.lenstag.com/ If you register your gear you can then through your photos track where your gear is.
You said “when daredevil photographer Bryce Wilson broke into Grundy’s home and stole $15k worth of gear. ”
This is not correct.
Wilson is not a photographer, he is a felon, a thief, a crook, and a slime, who should spend 10 years behind bars.
100 hours… man lucky he wasn’t smoking a joint, he would have seen some serious time
No jail time on a $15,000 theft? That’s ridiculous, you’d be looking at a serious felony charge in the US. But this is good information to have.