Hackaday · Creativity & design

Oldest Webcam Feed Archived

FogCam, the world's oldest continuously running webcam feed, has been archived by a project called Fog-Bank.

Installed at San Francisco State University in September 1994, FogCam uploads an image every 20 to 60 seconds. A project called Fog-Bank was created to save these images, as very few had been saved previously.

The Fog-Bank system uses four separate catchers across three networks to scrape images from the feed. These catchers run on personal servers, home machines, and Cloudflare, with each reporting the time it captured an image.

The system is designed to archive all images by ensuring at least one catcher grabs an image every 18 seconds, as FogCam has never replaced an image in under 19 seconds.

The current archive contains over 169,000 images from 377 days, with most content originating from a 2019 archiving effort when the camera's shutdown was anticipated.

FogCam is celebrating its 32nd birthday this week. The live feed is available for viewing.

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