CamTAK — 78,900 Live Cameras on Your ATAK Map | Traffic, Weather, Wildfire, Beach & City Cams in 110 Countries

ATAK can show you a pin at an intersection, a trailhead or a harbor mouth, but not what's happening there right now. The cameras exist: state DOTs, cities, ports, weather networks and wildfire lookouts publish tens of thousands of live feeds. They're scattered across hundreds of websites, half of them frozen or dead on any given day. CamTAK puts 78,900 of them on your ATAK map, in 110 countries, checks every one each hour, and plays them without leaving ATAK.

WHY IT'S IN THE SHOP

A camera list is out of date the week you download it: feeds move, tokens expire, cameras freeze on last Tuesday's picture. CamTAK is a plugin plus a District47 server. The server pulls 127 source feeds every day, throws out duplicates, checks each source's terms and credits its owner, then tests every camera every hour. Your phone only downloads what changed.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• 78,900 cameras, 110 countries. 66,569 road and traffic cameras from state DOTs and national road agencies, plus 12,347 others: beaches and harbors, ski areas, wildfire lookouts, weather and air-quality stations, volcanoes, observatories, wildlife and city cams, including 3,700 24/7 YouTube live cams.
• Plays inside ATAK. Live video (HLS), still images that refresh every 5 to 60 s, motion JPEG, and YouTube in YouTube's own embedded player. If a camera's first stream fails, CamTAK tries the next one and tells you why when none works ("Camera offline").
• A health ring on every marker. Green live, amber frozen, red down, from the last hourly check. One switch hides every camera that's down.
• Video wall. 1, 2, 4, 6 or 9 cameras at once in a grid that fills the screen in portrait or landscape: the nearest to the map center, or your favorites. Tap a tile for its card; Back returns to the wall.
• Camera card. Operator and credit, health and when it was checked, lat/lon and MGRS with one-tap copy, every stream with the one playing marked, sound on/off, full screen.
• Snapshot and share. Grab the frame on screen with the camera name, UTC time, position and owner burned into a caption bar. Send it to your team through ATAK, or pin it to a map marker.
• Share to team. Sends a marker with the camera's video link. Teammates with stock ATAK can open the stream in ATAK's video player; teammates with CamTAK get the full card.
• View cones. Drag two dots to show what a camera sees. Saved on your phone and drawn on the map.
• Find a camera. Search by name, list the 20 nearest to the map center or to you (with distance and direction), keep favorites, add your own camera from a YouTube, HLS, MJPEG or JPEG link, and move any camera that's in the wrong spot.
• Three marker styles. Picture (an icon per kind of camera), Feed type (shape by how it plays) or small dots, with a legend in Settings.
• Filters. By kind of camera, by country, and hide cameras that are down.
• Works offline from the first launch. The full catalog ships inside the plugin; updates arrive 15 s after ATAK starts and every 6 hours after that. An unchanged catalog costs a few hundred bytes to check.

HOW THE HEALTH CHECK WORKS

Every hour the server checks every camera twice, minutes apart. A live video must move forward (new segments between the two reads). A still image must change, or carry a fresh timestamp. A camera that shows the same picture for hours is marked frozen; one whose server doesn't answer is marked down. The latest count: 66,187 live, 8,330 frozen, 3,947 down. Down cameras stay on the map with a red ring unless you hide them, because many come back within the hour.

REQUIREMENTS

• ATAK-CIV 5.6 on Android 5.0 or newer
• APK, about 5 MB
• A data connection to play cameras (video uses about the same data as any streaming video; there's a Wi-Fi only option)
• GPS only for "Nearest to me"

HOW TO INSTALL

1. Check out. The download link arrives by email.
2. Copy the APK to your Android phone and install it.
3. Open ATAK and tap OK when it offers to load CamTAK.
4. Open CamTAK from the ATAK tools menu. Cameras appear on the map right away.

FIELD NOTES

Pictures can be late, frozen or wrongly placed, and a camera that was fine at the last check can drop between checks. Treat CamTAK as situational awareness, not a guarantee, and don't rely on it alone for safety decisions.

Cameras play straight from their owners' servers, so each camera's host sees your IP address, the same as visiting its website. CamTAK never sends your location; "Nearest to me" is worked out on the phone. The full privacy statement is in Settings > Legal & privacy.

Coverage follows what owners publish: dense in the US, Europe, Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, thinner in much of Africa and Asia. New sources reach every CamTAK user the next day, with no update to install. Missing a camera? Settings > Report a bug or idea.

Each camera belongs to its owner, who is credited on its card; District47 is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Includes open data from PhenoCam Network, GeoNet, ESO, Meteotrentino, Korea National Park Service, Digitraffic Finland and others under their licenses. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC. ATAK is developed by the TAK Product Center; CamTAK is an independent plugin.

DISTRICT47 · district47.us