A secondhand camera purchase unexpectedly turned into a search for its long-lost owner after a man discovered a collection of childhood home movies still inside the device.

Hoping to reunite the footage with the woman featured in it, he shared several clips on Instagram, where the video proceeded to go viral and quickly reached the person he was looking for.

Ben Coleman is a New York musician and producer who occasionally shares his work on Instagram under the username @bentcoleman. Prior to the discovery, his videos typically received only a few thousand views, with his most popular reaching roughly 36,000.

That all changed after Coleman purchased a used camera on eBay and discovered that its previous owner's memories had been sadly left behind.

After the camera arrived, Coleman found a tape containing old home movies and decided to post portions of the footage in hopes of identifying the woman who appeared in them and returning the recording to her.

The effort ultimately succeeded as the Reel amassed more than 3.9 million views in two days, along with hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of comments.

Throughout his entire video, Coleman is seen filming the camera's visor, which plays various clips that Coleman takes excerpts from.

In the first clip, a man is holding a baby on his lap as they sit in front of a cake and he, alongside the people off-screen, sing "Happy birthday, dear Abigail," to the baby, as the baby looks at them.

The second video features two girls dancing to Justin Bieber's song "Baby." One of them is wearing an eye mask and holding something as a microphone as she lip-syncs along to the song. The other girl, who is also lip-syncing, is seen wearing yellow glasses and a green hat.

The third video is of two kids on a bed, one of them wearing the green hat featured in the previous video. The other kid yells "It's coming down!" and they both throw themselves on the bed, screaming dramatically.

The fourth video features two girls in a kitchen, one of them wearing an apron and saying, "Cold cereal, if you have it," as if she was hosting a cooking show.

In the fifth video, a girl is on a beach, facing the camera and doing a peace sign with her hand. The person filming her, presumably her mother, says, "Oh, there's our lovechild right there!"

The sixth video, filmed with night vision, shows five kids in pajamas as their mother films them and says, "Should we go see what Santa left us?" The kids then run off with excitement before the clip cuts out.

"If your name is Abby/Abigail and you're from Utah," Coleman writes on text in the video, "and have siblings named Libby, Ellie, Parker and Hunter, I found your entire childhood on this camera I bought on eBay."

"DM me so I can send you the tape!" Coleman adds in the caption.

The family in the videos ended up quickly finding Coleman’s reel and leaving comments on it, expressing their amazement at Coleman finding their videos.

Other commenters expressed how they were similarly amazed, and the video even got a comment from eBay’s official Instagram account amid its virality online.