▶ Watch: 32 years of FogCam, in its own frames (or the Short)September 30, 1994 to September 30, 2026 · Fog-Bank, the FogCam archive
▶ Watch: 32 years of FogCam, in its own frames (or the Short)
On September 30, 1994, two SF State students, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong, pointed a camera out a window and put it on the web. FogCam has been running ever since, which makes it the oldest webcam in the world that's still going. It takes a picture every 20 to 60 seconds and throws the last one away, so of the roughly 44 million pictures it has taken, almost none exist anymore.
Here's what does, era by era.
The camera doing all this is a Logitech webcam on a bendy tripod at a window. For the 32nd I'm raising money to help the fogcam.org team get a new 4K webcam and better uptime: every month 75% of donations goes to them and 25% covers Fog-Bank's running costs. Goals, camera options and where the money goes.
FogCam publishes one picture at a time and throws it away when the next one lands. To ensure no more history is lost, Fog-Bank runs four concurrent catchers across three separate networks, fingerprints each frame with sha-256 the second it lands, and maintains transparent incident postmortems for every gap.
Read how every frame gets caught, review scene measurements on the forensic record, or inspect the open API and developer documentation.
Open any day and watch the fog come in. Pick a date that means something to you (a birthday, a graduation at SF State) and see if it survived. If it's from before 2026, it probably didn't, and that's the point of this whole thing.
If you saved FogCam pictures at any point in the last 32 years, even one, please send it. Every frame from before 2026 is rare, and every one that comes in gets its date read, checked and put back on the timeline with your name on it.
Fog-Bank is engineered and maintained by Justin Earl (Falcon Technix) as an independent digital preservation project. It runs on dedicated hardware paired with Cloudflare edge workers and permanent R2 object storage. The archive is not affiliated with SF State or with FogCam's creators, and sells nothing. The frames are historical records of FogCam and San Francisco State University. Press kit, attribution card and contact: the press kit.
More: the story · FogCam history, 1994 to today · the lost frames · how FogCam is backed up · open API