About
IP Crawl is a living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet. It collects cameras that are already exposed to the world — no passwords bypassed, nothing broken into — and turns them into a single, filterable surface you can browse, search, and watch live from the edge.
Think of it as a window onto thousands of unguarded vantage points: harbours and ski slopes, workshops and lobbies, quiet streets in cities you'll never visit. Each one is a small, accidental broadcast left running on the open web.
What you can do
- Browse the catalogue. Every known camera lands in the grid at the home page, sorted and paginated, with a still thumbnail for each one.
- Filter by place and source. Narrow the world down by country, city, or hosting organisation — or flip to live only to see what's streaming right now.
- Search. Free-text search across locations and organisations to jump straight to what you're curious about.
- Open a camera. Click any card for a larger live preview, technical context, and a shareable link.
- Save favourites. Star the ones worth coming back to; your picks are kept privately in your browser.
Prefer to wander? Console mode is a CRT-styled roulette that drops you onto a random channel, with a guess-the-location game, a screensaver, and shareable channel links.
How it works
A scheduled crawler queries public internet-intelligence sources for devices that publicly advertise a camera screenshot. For each result we keep only the essentials — rough location, hosting org, and a cached still — then periodically re-check which feeds are actually live.
When you open a camera, a live-frame proxy fetches a current image directly from the device if it responds, and quietly falls back to the last cached screenshot if it doesn't. The whole path is rate-limited and cache-shielded so browsing stays fast without hammering any single host.
On privacy
This project surfaces what is already public, and tries to be a responsible neighbour about it:
- Raw addresses are never published. You can watch a feed, but the site won't hand you a directly-hittable list of camera IPs.
- Favourites are deduplicated per visitor and stored without accounts.
- A blocklist mutes hosts that turn out not to be cameras, and feeds that disappear are pruned after a retention window.
If a camera here is yours and you'd like it removed, secure the device — once it's no longer publicly exposed, it drops out of the catalogue on the next refresh.
Made by @alectrocute · Join the conversation at r/ipcrawl