Fellow bird photographer, Steve G, found a lost SD card. It was back in August, in Snettisham, Norfolk, UK, a popular birding spot. The interesting thing about the card is that it had 3700 photos from a trip to Iceland, mostly birds as I understand. Steve has been trying to track down the card’s owner ever since.
There are no people in any of the photos, not EXIF data, no geotags, no clues. Steve reached out on twitter, lots of people with sympathetic to the person who’d lost the SD card. I posted about it on my socials, got hundreds of supportive comments on Mastodon etc. There was a lead…
Someone responded via a friend of a friend to say they’d had a camera stolen with an SD card in it. It seemed to be a possible, but it turns out lots of this person’s photos were of cats. There are no cat photos on our lost card. I’m still sharing…maybe one day…it will make the headlines if we can reunite the photographer with their Icelandic memories.
Incidentally, if you’re thinking that’s an awful lot of photos, remember that modern cameras can snap 50 or so frames per second, if you’re panning across the sky to get a photo of a White-tailed Eagle over a volcano, say, you might hold that shutter down for 10 seconds, if not longer. That’d be 500 shots of just that one flypast! Multiply that by the many dozens of other birds you might have snapped and it’d be easy to get to thousands of frames.
If anything, 3700 sounds like a low number and the Iceland photographer perhaps has half a dozen SD cards that they haven’t lost with just as many photos on each one!
Oh, by the way, do connect if you think this is your SD card…
Meanwhile, one of my twitter contacts suggested we should all add a text file and/or image file to our camera cards that contains contact information in case card, or indeed camera, is lost.
Another contact on Mastodon had two very good ideas about camera cards. The first was to suggest that manufacturers might add a permanent QR code on each card they make, that could be used to register one’s contact details at a central registry for lost and found cards. The second idea was to have the camera automatically look for that “personal.info” file, the one my earlier contact suggested, each time you insert a card and to offer to fill in the data from your camera’s meta data (which would include name and phone number, or other contact method.