Thursday, 7 September 2017

Found someone's memory card. Trying to find the owner.


I found a memory card while hiking, and would like to return it to the owner. This card has 2264 photos on it, all in .jpg format. You'd think there would be at least 1 image with an identifying feature. After going through them all, I can't find anything. It's all vacation photos of stuff (Italy, Greece, Las Vegas, etc) and photos of family members in indistinct locations.The camera is a Canon Powershot A710 IS, with no GPS data. Dang. (They didn't even set the date till after the first 20 images or so).The photos span 2011 through 2016. My guess is that this card was in a camera bag, and it fell out when the person was shuffling though their stuff along this hiking trail. The photographer appears to be a woman around 60 years old. Who knows if she actually downloaded these to a computer. It's possible this memory card was her only copy of these images (why else would they all be on the card?). I know people who operate like this - know nothing of computers and just look at the images on the camera, etc. She might not yet even realize the card is lost, or if so, where she lost it.All that said, there are a few possibilities.The best lead is a series of photos of a wedding in Hawaii. There are 6 photos of the bride and groom holding their wedding certificate. But, it's just far enough away that I can't make out the writing. I thought it might be possible to stack the images and magically recover enough detail via "superresolution"But, the images are all at slightly different angles, and the .jpg artifacts appear too much to overcome. In case anyone can do a better job of it, cropped versions of the images are here, posted as 100% crop .tif files, as to minimize additional compression artifacts. The last one is my best shot at using this method. Though, I probably could have been a bit more precise, etc.If I could read the names, I could find these people, and they'd know the photographer. I think the bride is the photographer's daughter or niece. If anyone recognized the wedding company logo/name, I might be able to ask them who got married on this particular date.Next, I suppose I could use facebook's facial recognition algorithms. But, I'm not sure how that works exactly. I have a facebook account, but rarely use it. Do I just post a few images to my account and see if facebook identifies the people? Is there a way to post a series and ask facebook to "scan the world" for a match? I have no idea.Finally, there's basic crowd sourcing... I could post a bunch of the photos to some popular site (e.g. here) and see if anyone knows these people.This is kind of a fun project. I'd rather not post the entire card anywhere, as this is someone's private information (though, its all G-rated vanilla stuff). But, maybe it'll come to that.Any other ideas? via /r/photography http://ift.tt/2gMo5bT

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