Camera Feeds

A camera feed shows the camera of the server device in a web browser. You can watch it live, let it watch for movement and keep short clips, and be notified when something happens. Camera feeds are part of the Pro unlock.

Adding a feed

On the Content tab, choose New Camera Feed… and give it a name. A feed sits next to your folders but is not one: it never appears on the network drive, is not an S3 bucket and holds no files. Names come from the same list as folders and repositories, so no two can be alike.

On the screen of the feed you pick the back or front camera, turn audio on or off, and get three addresses to open or share: the live view, a still snapshot.jpg and the Changes page. The status line says whether the camera is Live, Watching, Idle or Stopped. Since a phone lying flat sees the ceiling, a printable stand holds it upright while it charges and aims it at the room.

Watching

Open the address in any browser. There is nothing to install and nothing is loaded from the internet.

The camera starts when the first viewer arrives and stops around forty-five seconds after the last one leaves. One feed is live at a time. A stream address stops working once it has been idle, and after twelve hours at the latest, so you can share one without it becoming a permanent window.

Quality follows the slowest viewer and drops while the device is warm. On an https address you are about a second and a half behind the camera, and further behind on a plain http address, where Apple's player will not use the low-latency parts.

Watching for changes

Turn on Watch for changes and the camera keeps running at reduced quality, looking for movement. Each time something moves it saves a clip beginning a few seconds before the movement, so you see how it started. Keep clips decides how much history to hold, from two days and 200 MB up to thirty days and 20 GB, and old clips make room for new ones.

Clips are listed on the feed's Changes page and play there, each with a picture, a time and a length. The page also shows when the camera was not watching, such as while someone viewed another feed or the device was cooling down. On devices from 2018 and later, clips showing a person or a pet are labeled.

The Changes page always requires signing in with a device account, also on a feed anyone may watch, and clips are kept outside your folders where no network client reaches them. A watching camera is a running camera, so the green camera indicator stays on.

Notifications

The live view has a bell and the Changes page a Get Notifications button. Turn one on in a browser and you are notified when movement is seen, with the name of the camera, the time, "person" or "pet" when known, and a link to the clip. Pictures are never sent.

You get at most one notification per camera per minute, and a device that was offline gets the latest one rather than a stack. Notifications need the https address. On iPhone and iPad they work only from a Home Screen web app: open the Changes page in Safari, choose Share and Add to Home Screen, then open it from there and turn notifications on.

Who can watch

A feed is Off, Protected or Public.

• Off: the address answers nothing. New feeds start here.
• Protected: viewers sign in with a device account. The right choice indoors.
• Public: anyone with the address can watch, and links to it preview with a snapshot.

A public feed streams nothing until you also turn on Serve sensitive data for it. Until then the address answers that the camera is not published and no snapshot is offered.

An account narrowed to part of the server can be given some feeds and not others. A feed it cannot reach answers as if it did not exist.

Free and Pro

Camera feeds need the Pro unlock, all of it: the live view, watching for changes, the clips and the notifications. Without it, New Camera Feed… offers the unlock instead of creating a feed.

Feeds made during the trial keep their settings and stop serving: the address says nothing is streaming and the camera stops watching. Clips already recorded stay on the device, and the Changes page keeps serving them to anyone who signs in. Nothing is deleted, and unlocking Pro brings the feeds back as they were.