The original found photography was about photos that were never intended to be public. Their authors didn't publish them. They had been kept in boxes for years. (1)
I asked myself: Where can I find these images? Where are the digital images that were never intended to be shown? Should I buy obsolete hard drives at flea markets? Should I maliciously hack online computers?
Then I remembered the old-school sharing protocol: eDonkey with its primitive clients.
At the beginning of 2000s ed2k client installation used to automatically share “My Documents” folder. Windows put “My Photos” under “My Documents” so any standard installation shared all the photographs that were downloaded from digital cameras and phones.
Are people sharing all their images by mistake without knowing it? How much private information are they sharing?
In 2015, I started to systemically search images in the ed2k network.
Shared folder shows what I’ve discovered.
On February 2015, 11 I started “Shared folder” a new post photographic project.
The objective is download as many as possible pictures shared in the e2dk network in a supposition that the users don’t know that are sharing them.
Among the professional pornography and pedophilia (which I delete) there are thousands of amateur snapshots.
The project is reactivated to find out if users are still using e2dk network. Code is available as a Jupyter notebook.
This time search are focused in RAW photography and CV documents.
Finding are being published as NFT to increase the chance of exposure and, eventually, shift the awaerness about privacy.
Works on any debian distribution. I'm using Raspberry Pi OS on two raspberries (3 and 4). One of them is scheduling the searches and classifications through Apache Airflow. The other one is connected to the mldonkey network.
For documentation and sharing I found more useful to publish a notebook.
sudo apt-get install mldonkey-server ed2k-hash exiftoolsearch.ipynb uses telnet port of mldonkey to automate searches and downloads.
organize.sh moves out the downloaded files to a non-sharing location and try to find the camera's serial number and model to classify. Also groups the .doc/.docx/.pdf files.
-
Recent works about found photography on the internet space used flickr and other online sharing sites were people intentionally publish their photos.
-
Amazon list of books about Found Photography.