The Power of Social Media: Online Campaign Helps Reunite Backpacker With Photographs

How annoyed would you be if you were travelling and you lost all the pictures that documented your journey? Backpacker Catriona Bowman was convinced that the snaps of her trip around Europe had been lost forever when her camera card went missing in a bar in Amsterdam last July.

The Telegraph reports that luckily for Catriona, the tiny memory card was found on a baggage belt at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam by Peter Van Leeuwen.

Mr Van Leeuwen looked at the pictures on the card to see if he could identify the owner and when he saw Ms Bowman and her friend, he launched a social media campaign to try and track them down so he could return the pictures.

Mr Van Leeuwen compiled a video montage of the pictues and posted them on YouTube and Facebook under the heading “Who’s That Girl?” The video immediately went viral online and clocked up 33,500 views before a friend of Ms Bowman, who lives in Amsterdam, came across the clip and informed her.

A still from the montage Mr Van Leeuwen created and posted online

Ms Bowman has now made contact with Mr Van Leeuwen, six months after she lost her pictures. The 22-year-old said that she was “ecstatic and in shock.”

“It is absolutely bizarre. We were convinced they had gone forever. We are truly grateful to Peter for going to so much effort to track us down. The pictures hold so many amazing memories for us,” said Ms Bowman.

“We were in a bar by a canal in Amsterdam when I realised my memory card was full as I had been taking pictures all day. Emily [her friend] had a spare card in her glasses case so we quickly exchanged the cards, but a little while later we realised the full one had gone missing.

“We went back to the bar and were pulling cushions off chairs to try and find it, but it was nowhere to be seen,” she added.

Mr Van Leeuwen was determined to find Catriona and return her pictures 

Speaking about the power of social media, Mr Van Leeuwen said: “It’s amazing how fast news travels on Facebook. It’s really the new ‘lost and found.’ That’s why I decided to put it on Facebook and YouTube instead of bringing the card to the lost and found department of Schiphol Airport.”

We hope that if we ever lose something that important, someone goes to as much trouble for us in order to return it!