Nice project, I have following questions:
- How often do you make a picture?
- How did you managed power supply?
- Does it have some digital output already? Is it an open standard interface?

Here in Netherlands we have electricity meter as a hub, it is able to collect data from other smart meters (I have only gas at the moment). Water is relatively cheap here, so smart water meters are not that common yet. There is open standard for smart meters, but I have only electricity and gas connected.

For the record: I've build another solution for the same problem: #Hacking Water Meter , it is battery powered  and uses 2 inductive sensors printed on PCB. Both approaches have their strong benefits, it is matter of situation on site and personal preferences I think.

Water and sewer cost in my area is extremely expensive. $200/month is typical. We now use about 80% less water than the average Canadian thanks to extreme conservation/substitution methods using microcontrollers. The toilet uses non-potable water from the ground as well as the condensing gas furnace instead of municipal water for example.

https://hackaday.io/project/165664-zero-municipal-water-toilet

I often look at the image of the water meter in a browser once per day and enter the value into a cloud spreadsheet.

I use USB chargers as power supplies for the controllers. I'm not a fan of batteries and the WiFi uses significant power.

There is no digital output from the WiFi cam. Just an image of the display in a browser when you put in the IP address of the cam.

Another controller on the gas furnace and electric water heater automatically puts the number of seconds the furnace was on in the last 24 hours into a cloud spreadsheet in order to calculate cubic meters of gas per degree day. My modifications reduced that number from 0.6 to 0.4. It also puts inside and outside temperatures into the spreadsheet so I can see the furnace is running OK when we are away.

I documented many money saving ideas on https://sites.google.com/site/nodemcu12e/.

Most of them are documented here so click on my name to see my projects.

I save over $1,500+/year with them.

OK, cool. I cannot reach your website. I am getting "404 The requested URL was not found on this server. That’s all we know.", so cannot read your ideas.

I am using Home Assistant and can see usage graphs, they are built automatically for me: water flow and total usage per day. In this way I can estimate how much water is used for each activity. I plan to use Node Red to detect leaks and send a push message to my phone. Will post the scripts on my project page and github repo.

Most of them are documented here so click on my name to see my projects.

Interesting approach, I like the simplicity. In my case, the water meter has no display and it buried in the front yard. If I were going to do something like this I'd have to try the RFID route, which I think is how they read the meters remotely.

Look at Lora-E5 module. I used it for a mailbox flap sensor. My mailbox is outside and it was very challenging from RF point of view even for Zigbee, but with LoRa it works like a charm.
I think such device has to be battery powered in your case, right? There is no mains power supply connection I suppose.