Nolan Jameson was looking for a 50 mm camera lens when he found one “listed particularly low, at $100.”
He contacted the seller and met up in Portland to purchase the lens. A few weeks later, he downloaded a new app, Lenstag, which allows photographers to catalog their gear by serial number and let others know if something was stolen.
When Jameson entered the serial number for his new lens, he discovered another photographer had listed the equipment as stolen. Jameson contacted Lenstag and started talking to Trevor Sehrer, the app’s creator. Both men live in Vancouver, so they met up at a coffeehouse so Jameson could turn over the lens and Sehrer could send it back to its original owner, Carl Castro of Stockton, Calif., who had the lens stolen during a home break-in.
“It was an effortless process, and without Trevor’s help with that app, the owner most likely would have never received their gear back,” Jameson wrote in an email.
Sehrer created the app in 2013 after he noticed how much expensive equipment his wife, a professional photographer, has. Since then, 100,000 to 150,000 people have entered gear on the app, Sehrer said, and it’s helped 10 to 20 owners retrieve stolen equipment.
Sehrer’s goal is to fight back against gear theft and form a community where photographers can look out for each other.
“Some camera equipment is as sought-after as diamonds,” Sehrer, 36, said.
Sehrer, a former Google site reliability engineer who now holds the same position with another company, said he wants Lenstag to be the DMV for photographers.
“It’s harder to sell stolen cars because of the DMV,” he said.
The app is free to use. Photographers enter the name and serial number of the equipment into the app, and send in a photo of the piece of equipment with the serial number visible. Sehrer checks it and then accepts the entry.
Lenstag can also help photographers find stolen images online. A few months after launching, Sehrer’s wife had some flashes stolen. She accidentally marked her camera as stolen, and soon the app alerted her to the blog of a stranger, who was using one of her photos without permission.
Sehrer set up the app to let users know when a photo pops up online whose metadata show that it was taken with gear they registered.
Users can search the site by serial number to see if gear they’re looking at has been reported stolen, but that’s the only information they can get about other users, so potential thieves can’t use the app as some sort of treasure map.
Business plan
Sehrer built the site and app during nights and weekends. He said that to keep everything going was costing him about $1,000 a month. He started a pro membership for $19 a year with some added options, and he said that’s helping him cover costs enough that Lenstag will “keep going in perpetuity.”
For more information about Lenstag, visit www.lenstag.com.
