Every frame.
Forever.
FogCam has watched San Francisco State University since 1994 — and overwrote every picture it ever took. fogbank saves them. All of them. From now on.
Until fogbank, effectively all of them were destroyed by the next upload.
An archive for a camera that never kept one
Three jobs, done continuously, documented completely.
Capture everything
Every frame the camera publishes, fetched the moment it appears, named by its exact timestamp. Every attempt is logged — a gap in the record is provably the camera's, never ours.
Preserve losslessly
Frames are stored with JPEG XL lossless recompression — 16% smaller, bit-for-bit reversible to the original file. Nothing is ever thrown away, including the past: the 2019 community captures are being folded into the same timeline.
Publish forever
The archive is headed to the Internet Archive as open, torrent-backed public records — the same shelf where the only surviving FogCam fragments already live. No subscription, no single point of failure.
The archive that could have existed
One frame every ~20 seconds since September 1994. Hover the curve.
Log scale — the gap is the story. The Wayback Machine kept a stray frame whenever it happened to crawl the page; the 2019 community captures covered one month during the #SaveTheFogCam scare; fogbank captures everything, from 2026 on.
A little camera with a long history
- 1994 — Grad students Jeff Schwartz ("Webdog") and Dan Wong ("Danno") point the first commercial webcam at SFSU as part of their master's project.
- 2001 — Cambridge's Trojan Room coffee-pot cam retires; FogCam becomes the world's oldest webcam still running.
- 2019 — The creators announce a shutdown: "We felt it was time to let it go." The internet disagrees. #SaveTheFogCam wins — SFSU takes over on August 28.
- 2026 — fogbank begins the unbroken line: the first maintained, every-frame, permanent archive in the camera's history.
