After four months of tireless searching online, a U.S. woman has reunited a Canadian family with the vacation photos they lost when they dropped their camera in a Washington state park.

Randi Keeton says it's "surreal" to finally get in touch with the family whose pictures she's guarded since September, when she found their lost GoPro on a beach near La Push, Wash. The photos show a happy couple with two young children, whom Keeton now knows are from Rossland, B.C.

The California woman spent four months sharing the lost photos on Facebook with the hope that someone would recognize themselves and get in touch with her. She initially shared the photos around the Washington area, but expanded her search to Canada earlier this week when she noticed one picture of the father sitting in a chair with a Canadian flag design.

Keeton says B.C. tourists often visit Washington by ferry, and she figured that's where the family might have come from.

She was right.

She says she received a Facebook message from the family's father on Friday night, after she asked people to share the photos in Canada.

"A friend from school recognized him," Keeton said in a telephone interview with CTVNews.ca. She says the man goes by the name Fill on Facebook, and he was excited to get the pictures back after thinking them lost for good.

"He just wanted the pictures back. He wasn't concerned about the camera," she said.

Keeton says Fill and his family were camping at a hot spring near La Push when a wave swept their GoPro away. Fill tried to wait for the tide to wash it back in, but they were scheduled to take a ferry home the next day and there wasn't time to wait around.

"They ended up having to leave because they had to take care of the kids," she said.

Keeton returned the photos to Fill on Friday night by sharing them through Dropbox.

The family replaced their GoPro at Christmas and Keeton already has one, so the camera will be donated to a locate children's charity.

End of a long search

Keeton's efforts started last September, when she found the sand-encrusted camera half-buried among the driftwood and starfish on the beach near La Push. She took the camera to a nearby resort, but the resort refused to take the camera for their lost and found.

That's when Keeton decided to look at a few of the photos and try to find the owners herself. When she saw how young the children were, she said she sympathized with the family and wanted to get their pictures back to them.

"My thought was that this is probably their first family trip as a family of four," she said. "I thought about how devastated I would have been, had I lost our first family vacation photos."

She started circulating one of the family photos in nearby newsletters, then put the pictures online. The process started slow but went viral about a week ago, when her post was shared about 4,000 times in countries around the world.

She says Fill's friend spotted the photo when it was shared on a Facebook page in B.C.

"I found them after all this time," she said. "I don't give up."