Topic: Webcam image updating frequency

[Eno]

I had been sending images every 5 minutes via ftp for the last few years, and only every other hour at night. After the announcement about discontinuing webcams in Nov 2017, for the last month of WU webcam support I switched to 15 minute uploads, why I'm not sure.

After they said they would continue supporting webcams, Dec 2017, I learned from forum discussions that some users sent an image every minute!

What's a reasonable upload rate? Provide rationale.

[chief-david]

I let them pull it. so it is about 5-7 minutes

[jackman]

I'm ftp uploading every 15 minutes. It seems to be working well at the moment.

[Central Maine Weather]

I used to use the FTP method every 5 minutes, but once all the issues started happening I went to letting them grab the image (URL method). I have the time set to every 5 minutes, but it is pretty inconsistent. Sometimes it does update every 5 minutes, other times it'll go almost an hour before it updates. But it's still working here and there. I mainly rely on just sending my webcam image directly to my website, where it reliably updates once every 30 seconds.

http://monumenthillweather.webs.com/
   - Matt

[quailvalleywx]

I did have mine set to 5 minutes during the day and 30 minutes at night.  I've got captioned current weather data on the picture so there was still some value in updates at night, albeit less frequent.

I'm looking at maybe adjusting the upload frequency based on the dynamic nature of measured solar radiation.  On sunny days and at night there's not much sky change in the image but on cloudy days solar radiation can bounce around a lot.  Target would be between every 4 minutes with cloudy sky and every ~32 minutes during times of "not much to see here".  Weathercloud.net pulls a jpg every 5 seconds when your page is active but I'm not going to take and caption pics at that rate!  I'll give them 2 minute updates.  After back testing some solar radiation data I'll see if this is at all feasible or not - and error on the side of less frequent for WU's sake.  If not, 4 min during the day / 32 min night.

The goal is - If the sky is interesting then bump up the frequency.

[Jjm457]

I believe it's 5 minutes for me, however, with my Ambient HD cam, as others with Foscam cameras I can no longer access the camera because of the dumb plugin issue. 

[Aardvark]

I have two Bloomsky cameras sending data and pictures.  the pictures are updated by either bloomsky who says it is WU's fault and WU who says it is Bloomsky's fault every 3 hours.   MEH...

In any case, neither of my IP cameras or the Bloomsky camera shows up as being updated at all,  I have no control when or if Bloomsky sends an image. They claim every 15 minutes or every 5.  It still doesn''t work and frankly I don't seem to want to care
+

[gellenb]

I've had mine set to various times from every 2 or 3 minutes to 5 minutes over the years, and it never seemed to make a difference is how well it worked.  I was most interested in making the time-lapse video work decently on WU but gave up a long while back.  It doesn't make any difference to me, I just wish WU would come out and say what they want, that's all it takes.  As far as bandwidth is concerned, this is IBM in the background, they (should) know how to make something like this work, they know how many images they get.  So it all boils down to some simple math.  If they want bandwidth to stay low, then set a longer time.  Their running PureFtpd on their servers, so they could easily set the parameters they want enforce. I don't get why they have such issues like this.  Ftp was developed 30-40 years ago, even before the internet we use today, and works very well.  It's not a dead technology and is still the basis for much of the file transfer over the internet today.