MAGAZINE
Send a real postcard from a webcam
Somewhere on Terondo, a camera is pointed at a harbor you’ve never visited. It refreshes every few minutes, patiently, whether anyone is watching or not. Beneath it, a button turns that moment into a postcard — complete with a stamp, a white strip, and eighty characters in an italic that looks almost handwritten.
It’s called Postcard, and it’s the least useful thing we’ve built. We care about it a lot.
What actually happens when you click
The image on screen is the last one the camera sent. Clicking the button opens a panel that draws a postcard live, in front of you: the photograph at the top, a white strip below it carrying the place name, today’s date, and a line that says Good waves on a round world — or Good waves on a round world, depending on where you’re reading from.
In one corner, there’s a stamp. Not a picture of a stamp: a stamp drawn right there, perforated edges and all, with a little radio in the middle. It exists because a postcard without a stamp doesn’t look like a postcard, and because drawing one took less space than storing a photo of one.
Then you have eighty characters. That’s the whole message box. It’s short on purpose: a real postcard never had room for a paragraph, and that constraint is half the charm. Wish you were here, it’s raining, the boats are beautiful.
Fixed-image cameras only, and here’s why
The button appears on webcams that send a still image refreshed at intervals — the ones that behave like a photograph taken every few minutes. It doesn’t appear on live video streams.
The reason is technical and a little lovely. To turn an image into a postcard, we need to be able to read it — the browser must have permission to copy its pixels. Fixed-image cameras usually allow that. Live video streams rarely do — and a browser that’s denied that permission will display the image just fine while quietly refusing to export it. You’d end up with a black rectangle and no explanation.
Rather than hand you a broken card, we don’t offer one. And when a fixed-image camera proves stubborn anyway, the card folds up neatly instead of failing: you still get a framed, stamped card, simply without the pixels the browser wouldn’t release.
Where they end up
People send them to their parents. Some send the same harbor to the same friend every Sunday. Someone has built a small collection of sunrise over the same mountain, one card a week, and it’s quietly one of the loveliest things anyone has done with this site.
The card is a real image file — 1200 by 900 pixels — so it goes everywhere photos go. Messages, mail, printed and stuck on a fridge. Nothing of it stays on Terondo.
Why bother
Because a live camera is a strange gift. It’s a window someone left open, in a place you may never go, showing you exactly what it looks like right now — not last summer, not on the brochure. Making it something you can hand to another person seemed like the obvious thing to do with it.
Look for 📮 Postcard on webcam pages. No account, nothing to install.