A Pictorial Guide to avoiding Camera Loss

247 Comments / By / December 6, 2009

Have you lost your camera recently? Mislaid it somewhere in a national park? Left it in a taxi? Dropped it in the gorilla pit? Anyone can be a victim of the thoughtlessness and/or sleepiness that can lead to Camera Loss.

‘How can I prevent Camera Loss?’ I hear you ask, wishing I’d get to the point. Well, you can’t prevent cameras from getting lost, but you can do something so your camera can be found very soon after it has vanished.

All you have to do is take some photos – which you never delete from your camera – so when someone finds your camera at the bottom of the gorilla pit they are able to locate you and return the lost property to its rightful owner.

To illustrate just how you can safeguard your camera from the crippling effects of Camera Loss, here are the pics that I always keep on my camera.

Hello

You-Must-Have-Found-My-Came

thankyou

Unless

But-I'll-Assume

I-Probably

Like-on-a-Train

Or-At-The-Post-Office

Or-In-My-Dog

Well-Probably

I-don't-even

Nothing

Anyway,-Thanks

We-Have-Such

One-Time

Bath

Sorry

Anyways-Can-you-email

I-Will-Be-Relived

And-Will-Probably-Hug

Unless-You-Have-Personal

Or-You-Are-Remembering

In-Which-Case

OK-Go-Email-Me

And-I-Will-Go-Wait

247 thoughts on “A Pictorial Guide to avoiding Camera Loss”

  4. #2

    Does Number One know what you’ve been up to with her shower cap?

    Also, great post. You could totally be a mime with those facial expressions.

  5. esther

    discussion at booked out re this post has found that this would be more effective if you have the sequence available in a minimum of 7 languages as you are most likely to lose your camera overseas.

  16. anon

    Reminds me of a camera recently handed in to lost property at work. Conveniently had a photo with the owner’s name near the start enabling me to easily track down the owner. No hugs though.

    Also, I’m intrigued by your mixed use of serifs on the letter I.

  18. Cass

    Love it! I am giggling at my desk (and getting strange looks from my coworkers).

    Anon, the serifs are only on the letter I if it’s a capital (start of sentence or the word ‘I’). They’re like SUPER CAPITAL LETTERS!

  20. Andrew

    Hey thanks everyone for your kind comments.

    I do now feel sorry for the person who ACTUALLY loses their camera, googles the problem in panicked grief and winds up here. To that person: sorry!

  21. Tatiana

    Are you a show-man? I mean in the finest sense of the word.
    Very-well done!
    I have a strong feeling that I saw your camera somewhere here, in Russia..
    🙂

  22. LostInBrittany

    I’m not sure it would work.

    I tried something similar, I had a card with my name and address inside the camera bag.

    I lost my camera a month ago, and the ######## who found it, with the card inside the bag, never contacted me…

    🙁

  23. Patrick

    You might want to make the email address a little clearer- most people can probably guess the full domain etc even with lack of clarity, but doesn’t hurt to be careful!

    Other than that, fantastic 🙂

  25. Fredrik

    Great idea! But if you never format your memory card you will soon have trouble whit it.You can have data errors and corruptions. But, GREAT idea…

  29. TechyDad

    I lost my camera eight years ago. My wife and I had just returned from a Vegas vacation and I had over 100 photos on my memory cards. The camera was at the bottom of our backpack but due to a water spill was moved to the top. We’re pretty sure that someone took it out of the backpack during a flight change while I was in the bathroom and my wife was distracted (on her cell phone talking to her parents). Police were no help. They were only willing to fill out a report for insurance purposes. Insurance did pay for a new camera, so I wasn’t really upset about that. It’s the lost photos that I still miss.

    Now we keep our memory cards separate from the camera when we travel. So if the camera is stolen, they don’t get our photos. It might be handy to put these photos on a special “traveling” memory card. This way, they will stick with the camera if it gets lost/stolen, but any used/filled memory cards will be safe in a secure location.

  31. Chris

    Brilliant!
    Actually my Olympus allows you to change the start-up screen to a photo, so I wrote my details up in marker on a sheet and photo’d that for the start up screen … but I have a single shot at the start of each of my digital memory cards for the same reason (plus a “readme.txt” in case the memory card is read in a computer which is the same as on my USB memory sticks basically saying
    “please send me the contents of this memory card/stick, and feel free to keep the card as a reward, or send me the card and I’ll send you something back as a thankyou!”) … need to update it to say “if you find this in a camera, PDA or computer, I’d like that back, please!”

  33. klang

    I will do this, using my 2 and a half year old as the whiteboard holder .. play on that soft spot in the heart of the person “finding” my camera 🙂

  48. Grammar Nazi

    Everybody on the planet stop saying/writing “anyways.” It’s “anyway.”

    You wouldn’t say “at any rates,” or “anyhows” or “in any cases” or “in any events” would you?

    In case you would say any of those, stop doing that as well!

    As you were.

    GM

  49. maze

    What if the camera is lost in a non english speaking country?Like France, Kazakhstan…
    For info some camera have a little memory inside.

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