Archiving the Oldest Webcam Feed

FogCam, a webcam installed at San Francisco State University that has been uploading an image every 20-60 seconds since September 30, 1994, is being actively archived through a project called Fog-Bank. The archive now holds over 169,000 images spanning 377 days (most from a 2019 rescue effort), and the camera recently marked its 32nd year online. The view is mostly fog and sky rather than spectacle, but the real interest is historical continuity: continuous, timestamped imagery of the same scene across decades.

Fog-Bank uses four independent “catchers” on three different networks - a personal server, a home machine, and two Cloudflare workers - that scrape the feed and log when they grab fresh frames. Because FogCam never replaces an image within 19 seconds, the project enforces an 18-second capture window to guarantee no frames are missed; redundancy across hosts raises resilience against single-point failure. Commenters pointed out that most frames from 1994-present were never saved and urged longer-term design choices (timelapse generation, local UPS and storage, more durable hosting), and raised concerns about relying on short-lived cloud workers for a project intended to persist for decades.