What are others using for simple weather cams that allow you to share a JPG image link? I have several NEST cams which I love but I’m unable to share a link to a JPG image. Thanks!
Any camera works but how to share an image depends on where you’re uploading to. I’ve been doing a weathercam for over a decade now with ‘motion’ running on a raspi and uploading to my personal Internet site along with a little glue code to overlay weather data via ImageMagick and cron. I just taped a USB cam from a PC to the window. Works great.
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I use to run a USB cam as well at my home but it required me to run a USB wire to my computer and leave it on all of the time. I’m looking for a simple stand alone option with a battery or plug that connects via WiFi. Something like my NEST cams but allows for a jpg image link, my NEST cams only let my share a stream.
I use raspberry pi from zero to 3b and 4 with a variety of cameras that connect with a ribbon to the pi. The more powerful pis (4) then also receive the images from the other pis via wifi and create time lapse and weather graph displays and provide an Apache web server. All the cameras also ftp an image every minute to a remote web server to prevent my home server being overloaded when I post a link to the likes of this forum. And friends also have a similar pi setup uploading to the same server which are also converted into timelapse.
The 4k cameras are then effectively providing a 4k web page with a one frame per minute frame refresh rate, or click the image to see the last hour or which ever time I provide in the time lapse.
A raspberry pi zero with a 4k camera is less than $100 and can be programmed to do what ever you ask it.
One of my pi V2 cameras is attached to a telephoto lens to display a gliding launch about 8km away, so the quality is not beautiful. It means we can see who is launching by the colour of their glider.
I have lots of other projects and activities so my web pages are slightly broken as I only fix what I need to but this is what the camera page currently looks like:
http://home.exetel.com.au/flyfree/window/cameras.html
cheers Ian 
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Every network-aware camera I am aware of phones home to China and almost all require (insecure) ftp for their upload function. The ones I’ve used (Foscam and intellectual-property-stolen clones) all are that way, and their software is almost unusable anyway. Avoid.
A quick google search for “network camera that uploads jpeg” returned a pointer to one vendor you might look into, but I can’t speak to their quality or (in)security or support at all.
Thanks for the nice detailed post, love your cam page.
What you are doing with raspberry pi is more complicated and involved that I might be willing to take on, just looking for a simple plug and play WiFi cam that allows me to share a jpb image with a link.
I will check it out, thanks!
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