Take Selfies With NYC Traffic Cameras: A New Website Lets You Snap Pics With The City's Surveillance Systems

Capture the City in a New Way: Traffic Camera Selfies Are Here

Ever walked down a New York City street and wished you could snap a photo of yourself to share with the world? Now you can, thanks to a new website called TrafficCamPhotoBooth.com.

This innovative website, created by Brooklyn resident Morry Kolman, gives users access to over 900 traffic cameras across the city. The website allows you to take selfies using the very same cameras that the Department of Transportation (DOT) uses to enforce traffic laws.

How It Works

Selecting a camera from any location in the city, users snap a photo using the website. The image can be chosen in either photo strip or Polaroid format, giving your selfie a retro feel.

The website's functionality is made possible by how the DOT hosts the camera feeds. According to Kolman, "The New York City Department of Transportation hosts live feeds of these traffic cameras. Now, they're not live video. They're live images, they update about every two seconds. And if you just load up that image URL, the same way you would load up a picture or some other image that you would find online, that's completely public."

A Unique Artistic Challenge

Kolman, an NYC-based artist, got the inspiration for the project from a class he took with another artist. The instructor challenged the students to take a picture without being the one behind the camera. This led Kolman to consider using the ubiquitous traffic cameras, which capture the city's constantly moving scenes. He realized that even though they're designed for cars, these cameras still capture people in their lens.

A Free and Open Source Project

The website is completely free to use, and Kolman has no intention of making money from it. He says there are no advertisements served to users and their data is not tracked.

Kolman hopes to expand the project to other cities and has made the website open source. He welcomes contributions from others to make it more widespread. He says, "I might just kind of open it up and say hey, this entire website is open source. If you want to contribute, you can contribute to the repository and kind of let it expand that way. I'm happy to be like a steward of it."

The DOT's Take

So what does the DOT think about their cameras being used for selfies? They haven't responded to NBC New York's request for comment. However, Kolman doesn't seem worried. He says, "I don't really think it matters to them that much. And honestly, the way that the DOT has their traffic cameras set up makes it a lot easier to use for this kind of website than any other city in the United States or even the world. And so, I'm very thankful, at the very least for the way that they set up their web and API infrastructure."