Lost Car Keys Photokey

Lost Car Keys How to make it easier

I expect you’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of photos on your phone.  I’ve over seven thousand now, (I must get around to sorting them out). Well the one photo you should have, is one of your car key. Let me explain how it will help you with lost car keys.

This idea came to me last year. Now We’re not selling here, we can’t earn money from this in any way. However, this is so important, we know that if you follow some simple steps we list below, you could make life a lot easier should you ever lock yourself out, or have the nightmare of lost car keys.

Did you know that when we look at a car key, we can cut an identical key from what we see? Any good Auto-Locksmith will be able to read the key, just by looking at the spacing. How the key is deeper at some parts and shallower at others. This is the same as with the newer style of car key that has a groove along the key.

With this style of car key, a groove winds its way along the metal blade. As an Auto Locksmith, we can look at that and know what shape the key should be.

The Lost car keys Photokey discovery

A few years ago, a scaffolding firm from Bristol called us. One of their lorries was stuck in Lincoln. The key blade had broken away from the important electronics and was lost. Was there anything we could do?

Now, it was an old Iveco lorry and the locks were in a bad state, so we didn’t really want to start taking them apart to make a new key. So, we asked them such an obvious question.

Me: Do you have a spare key?

Bristol Office: Yes, but its 300 miles away in our office safe and we need the lorry moving today.

Me: Can you send us a photo of the key?

Bristol Office: Yes, will that help then?

Me: Oh yes!

They took a clear photo and text it to us. We could see exactly how to cut the key, and the lorry was up and running within the hour.

Locked out of your car made easier

This taught us a valuable lesson and we’ve used it countless times when the keys are just sat in the boot, or on a parcel shelf. This photo shows a set of Vauxhall Corsa keys, left in the car when the owner shut the boot lid.

From this photo we zoomed in, read the key, and cut a fresh one to unlock the car.

IMPORTANT – Money saving idea

The reason we’re telling you all this isn’t to show how clever we are, any decent Auto Locksmith will be able to do this. The reason is to save you money.

Scenario One.

You have lost your one and only car key. The car is locked up and you don’t have any codes to help you. However you do this, you’ll need to pay someone to either break into your car, or decode your lock to get the shape of your car key. The average cost for this in Lincoln is £80 and all that does is get you into the car.

However, if you had a good clear photo of your car key, the same quality as the ones above, a good Auto Locksmith will be able to look at it, cut the key and straight away you have saved yourself £60-£70 on the job! This is simply for taking a minute out of your life to take a photo of the key blade.

Scenario Two.

You’re locked out because somehow, the car locked itself while you were de-icing the windscreen. You need to get back in but because half a dozen other people have done the same thing, no-one can get to you until the afternoon, and it’s going to cost you around £90.

However, if you had a Photokey, and you showed us it, we could cut a key to your photo for around £25 and you could collect it from us, again, saving yourself £65.

The most common reason for being locked out? Click Here to find out.

What I do next?

This is really easy.

1. Lay out your key blade so that it is clean and well lit
2. Take a photo of the key blade so that it shows the shape of the key. If it looks blurry, try holding the camera further away and then zooming in. Remember you’re not entering a photo competition, you just need to be able to see the ups and downs of the groove, or the outside of the blade.
3. Send the photo to yourself as an email, and while you’re at it, send it to your parents and friends. They won’t even look at it, but if for some reason you can’t get into your emails, they’ll be someone who can.
4. Relax, forget about it, odds on you’ll never even need it again.

While you’re at it, what about your codes? To find out all about Photocodes, Click Here