Stolen camera finder, primarily, is a database mapping camera serial numbers to the urls of the jpeg files in which they were found.

This database is hosted on the Google App Engine and can be searched at stolencamerafinder.com.

The database is populated thanks to programs called "scrapers". These scrapers looks inside the EXIF data embedded within jpeg files on websites and submit them into the main database.

Scrapers can take take several forms:

• A browser plugin (such as the SCF Chrome extension) that quietly record serial numbers in images as they are displayed within the browser. The url of the image and the serial number can then be sent to the main database.
• A web crawler that methodically seeks out images and searches for serial numbers (such as the Flickr scraper).

In any form, a scraper populates the database through a single, simple API.

The source code for this project consists of the App Engine webapp that is the main website and database, but also some scrapers that serve as working examples. Since scrapers are entirely independent applications, it is easy for you to write your own. You could customise it to search only for a specifc camera model or in a given geographic area.