Fog-Bank, the FogCam archive · fog-bank.org · numbers on this page are live
Fog-Bank is an independent archive of FogCam, the oldest webcam still running. FogCam has looked out over San Francisco State University since September 30, 1994. It publishes one picture every 20 to 60 seconds and overwrites the last one, so almost nothing it has shown in 32 years exists anywhere. Fog-Bank has captured every frame the camera published since July 14, 2026, holds the frames fans saved during the 2019 shutdown scare, and plays any archived day back as a timelapse.
In August 2019 FogCam's creators announced they were switching it off after 25 years. A campaign (#SaveTheFogCam) and coverage from NPR, the Chronicle and others kept it running; SFSU took the camera over on August 28, 2019. During that scare one person saved about a month of frames. Until July 2026 that month was the only FogCam archive that existed.
Fog-Bank captures every frame from four independent vantages (a server of its own, two pollers on Cloudflare's network feeding a permanent mirror, and a home connection in another state), hashes each frame with sha-256 the moment it arrives, converts it losslessly to JPEG XL, and keeps it. It also keeps a public record of every gap and whose fault it was, the camera's or the archive's, on every chart with a time axis. The camera turns 32 on September 30, 2026.
| frames held | 200,953, across 378 days, the oldest from 2005-05-18 |
| complete days | 85 |
| 2019 rescue | 126,835 frames, Aug 22 to Sep 25, 2019 |
| pace | about 1,319 frames a day on a complete day, one every 45 seconds |
| taken since 1994 | roughly 44 million frames, an estimate from measured cadences; nearly all of them are gone |
| gaps since July 14 | FogCam published nothing for 137.2 h in total; the archive's own capture was down 41.6 h, every minute of it recorded and attributed |
| today | 651 frames held of 651 the camera published, as witnessed by the second poller |
| Sep 30, 1994 | FogCam goes online at SFSU, built by students Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong |
| Aug 2019 | shutdown announced; #SaveTheFogCam; SFSU takes the camera over on Aug 28 |
| Aug 22 to Sep 25, 2019 | the community rescue: the only frames that survive from before 2026 |
| Jul 14, 2026 | Fog-Bank begins capturing every frame ("the line") |
| Aug 7, 2026 | Fog-Bank finds FogCam's host serving stale copies and changes every poller to cache-bust; details on the net |
| Sep 8 to 10, 2026 | FogCam froze for 64 hours; the archive's own server was down for 40 of them (a full disk on the host). Both recorded, both shown, no frame lost that was ever published |
| Sep 30, 2026 | FogCam turns 32 |
Any archived day plays in the browser at /archive; daily and hourly timelapses are on the Fog-Bank YouTube channel. The frames are FogCam's pictures, archived by Fog-Bank. For coverage of the archive, use them; credit FogCam, San Francisco State University, archived by Fog-Bank (fog-bank.org). Higher resolution stills, a timelapse clip cut to length, or screenshots of the tools are a reply away.
Fog-Bank is built and run by one person, Justin Earl (sworrl), on his own hardware plus a small amount of Cloudflare, as a preservation project. It is not affiliated with SFSU or with FogCam's creators, and it does not sell anything. The code and the record of how every frame is caught are described on the net and the backup page.
Reply to the email you received, or use the form at /contribute and say it is press. Replies come within a day.
More: the story · FogCam history · the lost frames · the forensic record