FogCam is the oldest webcam feed that’s still up and running. Installed at San Francisco State University, it’s been slowly uploading a new image to the web every 20 to 60 seconds or so since September 30, 1994. Very few of those images have ever been saved, but [Justin Earl] has come along to fix that with Fog-Bank.
[Justin] was eager to have top-notch coverage of the FogCam, so set up four separate catchers across three separate networks to scrape images from the feed. He runs one on his own server, one on his home machine, and two small programs running on Cloudflare. Each catcher reports the time it grabbed a fresh image from the site. FogCam has never replaced an image within 19 seconds, so as long as one of the catchers grabs an image at least every 18 seconds, [Justin]’s system should be archiving everything that’s being captured.
Currently the archive hosts over 169,000 images across 377 days, though the majority of that content is from a 2019 archive effort when it was believed the camera would soon be shut down. More stats are available, too.
It’s not the most interesting view in the world, but it’s neat to see such a project continue running long enough to celebrate its 32nd birthday this week. We’ve featured other neat webcam-related content before, too. Meanwhile, you can go check out the live feed if you want to peer through FogCam yourself.
dang, that would have been cool if it saved images from at least 2000; i’d be in one or two of these for sure!
Thanks for pointing out your elitist priviledge. As AGH graduate I’d be pleased to spit in your face.
I wonder if the first webcam ever, the mighty coffee machine watch, was ever truly “online” in the sense “entire world can access the feed”.
this is a cool way to see the fog in sf, especially today: https://ops.alertcalifornia.org/cam-console/2429
https://img.cdn.prod.alertwest.com/data/img/2429/2026/10/01/Sutro_Tower_2_1790881442_6221_p.jpg
Dangit, I had frogcam up (an African frog in a tank in my living room) up in 1993. Half the people at my corporation had it on the screens during the day.
Wish I would have left it up.
Wow, if it had a bit better resolution you’d be able to watch the ethnicities get completely swapped out in time-lapse
I wonder if you mean when colleges altered their admission practices to ensure some non-white/non-asian people got in, or when that practice became illegal?
Since this cam started in the early 1990s it might actually have seen that second event. California Proposition 209 made race-based admissions illegal there in the late 1990s. That sharply reduced the population of black and latino students in the following years.
The more recent Supreme Court ruling probably didn’t have much effect in California, in light of Prop 209.
First off, please stop posting political nonsense.
Second, at least don’t lie. UCLA is under criminal investigations and lawsuits are happening for direct violations of the civil rights act. The fact they have to be told not to be racist is weird.
Oh what fun! Is this a reference to the great replacement conspiracy theory that I’ve heard so much about?
I would’ve hoped people like you could have been a bit wiser these past fifteen-plus years to prevent massive reactionary blowback from happening all over the world, but it’s appearing that nothing was learned and there is only hollow snark and nagging to back up claims against the living memory of tens of millions. What was it you expected to happen? Why are tactics still over a decade stale?
If there would be a timelapse available from 1994 until now, this would be moderately interesting.
You can always take available photos and ask AI to generate older ones.
I’m confused – this project started to collect the images just last year. The 45M images since 1994 are forever lost. Why not set up a new webcam with long term archival?
Maybe with local UPS to keep running, maybe with local storage in case the internet goes down?
There is some redundancy in the web stack, but I’d be surprised if the Cloudflare workers keep going for 5 or 10 years without any change