Manhattan Beach and the South Bay piers on camera
At 06:05 Pacific this morning the Manhattan Beach pier was lit end to end, a line of lamps running out over black water, the car park behind it empty and the palms along the bluff still in silhouette. Sunrise was not until 06:48. The frame came off Manhattan Beach Pier South, which had written it forty seconds before I asked.
Seven cameras in the South Bay were awake when I checked on 2026-10-02, and the two best of them are at the pier.
The pier, from the bluff and from the panoramic
Manhattan Beach Pier South sits above the top of the sand and looks south down the beach, over a car park and through a row of palm trunks, with the pier and the red-roofed Roundhouse at the right of frame. New still every 60 seconds. The trunks split the shot, which matters less than you would expect: after dark the pier lamps carry the whole picture, and in the afternoon you can read the swell lines and the size of the crowd straight off it. Worth a look at either end of the day.
Manhattan Beach Pier Ultra HD stands about 19 m along the bluff from it, by the coordinates the two pages publish, and gives you the wide version: the deck running away from you with its lamps evenly spaced to the end, palms stacked down the left, the bluff path underneath. This is the one for sunset, because it holds the horizon as well as the pier. Its frame was 13,512 bytes written at 13:01:04 UTC on 2026-10-02. Sunset today is 18:36 Pacific, per Open-Meteo for the pier's coordinates.
El Porto, 2.2 km up the sand
Two more sit at El Porto, by the power station, where the beach gets its reputation for surf.
El Porto Beach Roving is a pan-tilt-zoom, so the framing changes under you while you watch, which is the reason to pick it over its neighbour. At 06:05 it was all sodium orange, a palm trunk straight down the middle of the shot and the railings of the lifeguard station picked out at the right. Its frame landed in the same minute as the others.
El Porto - Manhattan Beach Live Surf Webcam is the fixed one next to it: low, flat, pointed straight at the water from the Strand, a lifeguard tower dead centre and the shipping lane on the horizon. Before dawn there is one bright light out on the water and a lamp over the sand, and there is very little else in the frame. Come back at eight in the morning and it is the surf check.
The catalogue follows the stream now
On 2026-09-25 those pier stills were a fortnight old. HDOnTap had moved the streams between servers: the object we had written down lived on a hosb3 path with a plain filename, and the live one had moved to hosb1 with a seven-character hash on the end that rotates through the day. The old object is still sitting in storage, still answering 200 with its sunny September afternoon.
What we store for the pier today is the hashed object on the new host, the one HDOnTap's own pier page points at. On 2026-10-03 that page served the pier thumbnail as snapshot_hosb1_manhattanpier_swellmagnet.stream_OAX26fL.jpg, and the seven characters before the extension were different the day before, so one of those filenames is worth about a day. The path either side of the hash holds still, and that is the part we store. Both El Porto stills carry their current hashes too. A source re-run rewrites the feed URL on a camera it already has rather than only adding new ones, and the proof is on the page: two cameras at the pier where we used to list one, and a roving El Porto camera we were not carrying at all.
The second half of the change shows up on the two that genuinely stopped. El Porto Rosecrans Overlook and Santa Monica Bay are both marked Currently Offline on their own pages, at 0% over their last four checks, and neither appears on the Manhattan Beach page any more. A still that answers 200 with the same bytes every time no longer counts as alive. Their pages stay up, because a camera that comes back should come back to the same URL.
If you read the uptime bars this week, the four working cameras show 25% over their last four checks. That is the frozen fortnight ageing out of a four-slot window, not something happening today.
Three more within a short drive
Manhattan Beach Cam and Surf Report, run by the YouTube channel The Surfers View, is a video stream rather than a still, so it actually moves. The shot is through two palms from above the Strand, looking up the bay: beach running north past a lifeguard tower and a flag, the breakwater at the right, and the mountains stacked in haze at the far end. It was live when I checked at 13:08 UTC.
Two more are a few minutes south, filed under our Hermosa Beach page, which is where to look for them. City of Redondo Beach Pier burns the time into the top of the frame, about as honest as a webcam gets - mine read "Friday, Oct 2, 2026 6:06 AM" at 06:06, with purple and white lamps down the walkway, two people out for an early walk and the pier entrance sign lit at the right of shot. City of Redondo Beach Harbor looks out across the water to the hills, boats on their moorings in the foreground. The city of Redondo Beach runs both, on its own YouTube channel.
What we are doing next
The freshness test runs across every still-image feed we hold, so this page is a sample rather than a special case. The next job is going the other way round: walk the sources that serve stills from a CDN, compare the path we stored against the one the provider's current page points at, and correct the ones that have drifted before the frames stop rather than after.
That still leaves a camera that has been repointed. Same provider, same path, fresh bytes every minute, pointed at a different street - a byte comparison says it is healthy and it is, and the label on it is wrong. I have no test for that yet. If you run a directory and you have solved that half, I would like to hear how you did it.