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 puts up one picture every 20 to 60 seconds and overwrites the last one, so almost nothing it has shown in 32 years exists anywhere. I have kept every frame it published since July 14, 2026, along with the frames fans saved during the 2019 shutdown scare, and any archived day plays 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, and 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 there was.
I catch every frame with four catchers on three networks (my own server, two small programs on Cloudflare that feed a permanent mirror, and a machine at my house), fingerprint each one with sha-256 the moment it arrives, store it losslessly and keep it. Every gap is on the record with whose fault it was, FogCam's or mine, on every chart with a time axis. The camera turns 32 on September 30, 2026.
| frames held | 262,887, across 422 days, the oldest from 2005-05-18 |
| complete days | 128 |
| 2019 rescue | 126,835 frames, Aug 22 to Sep 25, 2019 |
| pace | about 1,406 frames a day on a complete day, one every 43 seconds |
| taken since 1994 | roughly 45 million frames, an estimate from measured cadences, and nearly all of them are gone |
| gaps since July 14 | FogCam published nothing for 229.8 h in total, and my own capture was down for 82.6 h. Every minute of both is on the record |
| today | 1,034 frames kept of 1,031 the camera published, as counted 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 starts keeping every frame ("the line") |
| Aug 7, 2026 | I find FogCam's server cache handing out old copies and change every poller to ask for the real file (details on the net) |
| Sep 8 to 10, 2026 | FogCam froze for 64 hours, and my server was down for 40 of them (a full disk on the machine it runs on). Both are on the record, and no frame that was published is known to be lost |
| Sep 30, 2026 | FogCam turns 32 |
Any archived day plays in the browser at /archive, and the daily and hourly timelapses are on the Fog-Bank YouTube channel. The frames are FogCam's pictures, archived by Fog-Bank. You're welcome to use them in coverage of the archive. Please credit FogCam, San Francisco State University, archived by Fog-Bank (fog-bank.org). I can send higher resolution stills, a timelapse cut to length, or screenshots of the tools if you need them.
Websites, blogs and news articles can embed a lightweight live camera widget:
<iframe src="https://fog-bank.org/embed/live" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" loading="lazy"></iframe>Options: retro Windows 95 frame (?t=win95), Windows 98 (?t=win98), or Windows XP (?t=winxp).
Fog-Bank is engineered and maintained by Justin Earl (Falcon Technix) as an independent digital preservation project. It runs on dedicated infrastructure paired with Cloudflare edge workers and permanent R2 object storage. The archive has no corporate sponsorship, carries no ads, and is not affiliated with San Francisco State University or FogCam's original creators. Full architecture, hardware specs, and transparent outage ledgers are documented on the net and the backup page.
For press inquiries, technical questions, or interview requests, reach Justin directly at [email protected] or 412.417.9010. You can also use the form at /contribute and mention it is press.
More: the story · FogCam history · the lost frames · the forensic record · open API