Livelook.tv Blog

You may have noticed livelook.com is no longer a webcam site.  Livelook recently sold the Livelook.com domain name to Livelook, Inc. a screen sharing startup company.  Livelook, Inc. has a really innovative product for easily sharing what’s on your screen.  If you’ve ever tried WebEx you know the lengthy download and setup for a new meeting.  Livelook has an easy product where there’s no setup or downloads, just type in a code on their website and you’re instantly sharing.  

The webcam site formerly found at livelook.com is now located at livelook.tv.   Look for some changes over the next few months.  

It’s been about a year since the boulderflatironcam went live.    One interesting thing was the huge interest from Mac dashboard users.  The latest Mac OS 10.5 has the ability to grab any image on the web and automatically create a dashboard widget.  It’s a nice feature and makes the image accessible but put a lot of load on the hosting server.  The original image was 120k and with thousands of requests per second my hosting account was shut down.  To alleviate this I created a small php generated thumbnail of the original large 120k image.  This thumbnail is available to all at http://boulderflatironcam.com/camera0.jpg    The large image is now blocked for direct access but can still be viewed online at http://boulderflatironcam.com/boulderflatironlarge.html  This change has stabilized the hosting account and allows me to keep the costs low enough to continue providing the site.  The StarDot NetcamXL has worked very well in all sorts of weather conditions.   The support team from Stardot even helped tune up the color balance in the image.   I’d recommend the StarDot webcam as a good solid network cam that hasn’t needed any maintenance over the last year.  If there was just a way to keep the enclosure lens clean it would be maintenance free!  View of the camera installation.  From this shot you can see the webcam captures only a slice of the great view.      

Do you like Sunsets? What if you could see live views of the setting sun as it makes it’s way around the world? With Livelook Sunset Cams now you can! Livelook Sunset Cams dynamically searches the Livelook database of webcams and displays all cams that are within minutes of sunset.

I’ve found it’s pretty entertaining to watch the sunset move around the globe. Just check back to sunset cams every fifteen minutes and there will always be something new.

Depending on the time of year you can get a great variety of sunset locations. The sun might be setting in Minnesota at the same time it’s going down in Brazil. This concept is easy to see with the map results button on the page. It plots the cams on the Livelook webcam map search page.

There will be some times of the day when no results will appear. You can click the Map results button to see where the sun is setting at that time. And if you know of any webcams missing on some remote Pacific Island please be the first to upload a new cam for that location! I still wish for an Easter Island webcam.

You may see some cams where the image does not display. Often those are streaming cams or cams where the image is not accessible. Please give the webcam owners some love and click the title or image thumbnail to go to their website and see the full size image.

If you like the Sunset Cams page you can click the email results button to send the URL to a friend. You can also click the options link under each cam to add one to your My Livelook page or email the URL to a friend. This feature is could still be improved so please make comments here or drop us a line at our contact form.

A sample of some of the beautiful sunset images found through the sunset cams page:

St. Paul Hazecam

Intercontinental Tahiti Resort – Great webcam!

We’re pleased to announce a update to the Livelook user interface (UI). The new design should make navigation in the site more uniform. It also gives us room to expand features with the tabbed navigation style. The screen layout has been opened up to a wider layout as we noticed most of our visitors are on modern equipment. This will allow us more freedom in page layout and more space to make things easier to see.

Thanks to the team for pulling off this update. We hope you like the new look.

We would love to hear your feedback and thoughts, just drop us a line here.

Here’s one last look at the old site. Compare to the new site here.

The first release of Livelook back in October 2006 was designed as an online webcam viewer. I had lots of bookmarks for webcams but wanted a site where I could view them all quickly from any computer. Webcam Watcher from Beausoft was an inspiration but as a Windows application it had some problems. No viewing from other computers, very slow with lots of cams, no sharing of cams, only runs on Windows, etc. Airliners.net was another inspiration. The ability for members to upload a photo, share it with the group, rate the photos and click for similar photos was something missing from webcams. So Livelook was created as a web based platform to store and organize webcam images.

My Livelook is that original feature and it’s still a great way to organize and view your favorite webcams. You can create groups of cams, select the image size in the layout options, add new cams easily and set cams as shared. The sharing option is leveraged in the later search features so any visitor can search for cams that you’ve added and shared. The edit mode of a cam shows similar cam URLs – this is helpful if your link is out of date but someone else in the database has already updated the link.

The search results in Livelook also have a nice feature where you get an option to add cams found by other users to your My Livelook page. This feature is a great way to quickly add interesting live cams to your favorites. It’s also possible to rate each cam from when saving to My Livelook and the ratings will help other users find high quality and interesting cams.

Please post a comment or drop us a line from the contact page with any feedback or suggestions for My Livelook.

If you would like to add live webcam search to your site Livelook has a couple great widgets. The first will search the Livelook database of thousands of live cams based on the location that a user types into the search box. The results will be displayed by location on a Google map.

The second is a widget that lets you set the location and zoom level to show all webcams near the location set in the widget code. In this example you can click to see all the cams in the San Francisco Bay Area.

To add widgets to your site go to the widget code page and copy the code block you want into your html webpage. http://livelook.com/generatecode.php Drop us a line if you need help.

When you create a My Livelook account the first screen is populated with some sample webcams. The samples are webcams that we’ve found to be exceptional quality or content.

• Old Faithful Geyser Webcam – The Old Faithful WebCam sends a new real-time photo of Old Faithful Geyser approximately every 30 seconds.
• Tusker Trail’s Kilimanjaro Webcam – The first and only live webcam at Mt. Kilimanjaro. Great morning views of Kili.
• Pyramid Cam – Live views of the Pyramids of Egypt. Great views and image quality
• Golden Gate Bridge CBS5 Webcam – One of the few live close up images of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
• Webcam Bora Bora – Pearl Beach Resort – If this doesn’t make you want to go on vacation.. A spectacular view of this exotic paradise.
• Yosemite Live View of Half Dome from Ahwahnee Meadow – Great image quality and spectacular subject with Yosemite’s Half Dome up close. Check out the other webcams of Yosemite at the same site.

While adding and browsing webcams on the Livelook site I’ve found a lot of great cams. I haven’t been able to find any blogs dedicated to all the great outdoor webcams on the internet, so I’ll just start commenting on what I like.