Decided to do some research and a lot of what I find is telling me it's best to re-evaluate the idea. :(

The problem is that the biggest photo social sharing sites (flickr, facebook, etc) are severely stripping the EXIF info and leaving almost nothing to work with. Here's an example of my own: http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm6.staticflickr.com%2F5150%2F5773656213_e2331ee3d6_b.jpg

I'm betting this is related to privacy issues and there is nothing we can do about it. :(

There seems to be already serial numbers (for both lens and bodies) embedded in the EXIF (under M A K E R N O T E S ) when the JPEG files aren't being stripped, just look at this one from the Imaging Resource: http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F216.18.212.226%2FPRODS%2FDMCGH2%2FFULLRES%2FDMCGH2hSLI00160_NR3D.JPG

However and disappointingly, searching Google for images with "2010:11:01 no. 0057" (the serial number on that GH2 from Imaging Resource) does only return a few limited results and the same goes for that lens, so using GENERIC EXIF tags would probably be wiser (even though I have no way to test if the results would be better).

Targeting the "Make" or "Camera Model Name" tags is obviously dangerous because I reckon it would break most RAW converters as they should depend on exact matches to do their camera identification and color profiling.

The best GENERIC candidate EXIF tag I've seen so far is the "Software" tag, which seems to report camera Firmware Version and on my GH2 is set to "Ver.1.1". Image googling for "Ver.1.1" does indeed return a hefty number of results (~775K) but we have to factor in that these are from every GH2 non striped image indexed by Google, so ... again I have no way of telling whether it should give more hits than the serial numbers, however this is much less likely to be stripped off from the EXIF as it is probably considered GENERIC information.

Well @Vitaliy_Kiselev , I guess this is useful information to evaluate the cost/benefit of implementing this idea.

Thanks for your work.

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/2667/ghxgxgfxgxx-questions-and-suggestions#Item_13

Thanks, I got it. Really good idea.

But, no need to post in development category.