January 18, 2014
By Kain Tietzel
In Blog
1 Comment
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Tagged: android camera equipment ios protection safety video

Lenstag: Free theft protection and monitoring for cameras, lenses and video equipment

We’re always on the lookout for cool new ways to help our users. Lenstag is a recently-launched free online service that records the serial numbers and images of all your camera gear in a secure, private registry. Lenstag is available for iOS, Android and the web.

If any item should go missing, you can update the status and Lenstag creates a public web page listing the item’s serial number and model name that’s indexed by search engines. For the first time ever, anyone can determine whether or not a camera, lens or other photographic equipment is stolen.

For example, do a Google search for ‘lenstag 75165’ and the first result is the page for a stolen Canon Fisheye lens (it happens to belong to the Lenstag founder, Trevor Sehrer, who had it stolen while visiting Munich, Germany). If an OEM service center, law enforcement, a second hand goods store or anyone else happens upon the item, they’ll be able to use this page to contact Lenstag and Lenstag will contact the owner.

Lenstag is still a free service so we recommend that you get onboard as soon as you can, it only takes minutes to register your gear. The key requirement is a snapshot of the serial number on an item to prove that you are in possession of it. Once the snapshot is uploaded to Lenstag their verifiers will make sure the serial number on the item matches what you’ve typed in as well as perform a suite of anti-fraud checks and if those pass, mark the item as verified. Once it’s been verified, you are free to use Lenstag to transfer the item to a new owner so they don’t have to go through the verification process. And of course in the event your gear is lost or stolen you can update the status on Lenstag.

Your gear is yours. Get it on record with Lenstag. Check out www.lenstag.com, download the iOS app or the Android app and start protecting your gear for free today.

Written by Kain Tietzel

Kain is a co-founder, creative and marketing director at Fotomerchant. You've probably seen his template designs, blog posts and video content. His photography website lomovision.net is home to a collection of lomography, instagram and experimental photography.

timothyhood

People need to realize that this site does nothing. The one-man-show doesn’t even respond to support tickets for months. Heck, there’s not even a way to mark an item of yours as not stolen if you recover your items. The site purports to search the web looking for images with your gear’s EXIF data, but it does no such thing. It purports to protect your images by searching for unauthorized use of them, but it doesn’t do that, either.

It’s just a crude database with a poorly-designed interface that collects your camera info. This don’t-quit-your-day-job operation over-promises and under-delivers on the hope that you’ll pay for an annual subscription of snake oil.