Lost pics returned via internet campaign
2013-02-13 12:11
A young backpacker has been reunited with her lost camera memory card containing 300 photos of her trip across Europe thanks to a large-scale social media campaign.
The Telegraph reports that Catriona Bowman (22) had lost the miniature card, measuring just half an inch across, in a bar in Amsterdam in July last year.
Miraculously it was found by a Dutch advertising agency boss, Peter van Leeuwen, on a baggage carousel at Schipol airport.
He looked at the pictures on the card to see if there were any clues to identify the owner, and saw that they showed Catriona and her friend Emily Fazah (23), travelling around Europe.
He launched a social media campaign to try and track down the mystery women so he could return their photographs.
He put a selection of the pictures on YouTube in a video montage called 'Who's That Girl?' and posted links to it on Facebook and Twitter.
His 24 second video ended up being viewed 33,500 times after the story of his search was picked up by Dutch newspapers and radio stations.
Finally a friend of the pair who lives in Amsterdam saw the posting and notified them - six months after they had lost the card.
Catriona, who is currently working as an assistant in a ski shop in France, said she was "ecstatic and in shock".
She explained that they had been in a bar in Amsterdam when she realised that her memory card was full, and that she had decided to take it out and replace it with a spare one. In the process the full card had gone missing.
They gave up hope and believe it is "an absolute mystery" how the card ended up at the airport several miles away.
A similar scenario took place last year when a red-head Canadian tourist's camera went missing in Amsterdam and a tech-savvy Dutchman posted one of the photos on Facebook. Two days and more than 56,000 shares later, Van Gogh posted the good news, saying "Looks like we found him!" and "It's a guy from Canada who is on a trip through Europe."
