Email notification with attached snapshots/photos/video taken on motion detection

Wishlist Maybe Later
1

It’s way quicker to view an email and look at a view frames of the images taken at the time of a motion detection event, than to load the app and watch through a couple of seconds of video footage (which may just be false positives).

My Dlink DCS-933L IP cam and other IP cams I’ve owned previously support this. Assuming that your email is with Gmail, you can even set up a Google App Script to sync the email attachments to your Google Drive, then use the Backup & Sync app from Google to automatically download images to a folder on your PC. So basically, all you need to do is monitor the folder for any new images, look at them and quickly identify if something actually happened that triggered the motion detection and whether further action is required.

Or, without using Google App Script, maybe support upload of the taken snapshots to Google Drive or other cloud services.

If anyone is interested in the Google App Script set up, let me know.

2

Hi I have a request that’s related, wondering if you could help me. I’m interested in capturing an image at a set time each day and pushing it the cloud for image processing. Any idea how I could go about this? Thanks!

3

You could use IFTTT to trigger a short video clip recording at a certain time each day. This would be saved to the Wyze cloud. Although it’s video, not still.

4

Thanks @Loki, I could likely grab a still from the video. However, is there a way to get this video uploaded to a cloud location such as google drive instead of the wyze cloud?

2 Likes
5

No there isn’t at this time. You might want to hop over to the two posts below and vote for them:

6

I found my solution. As many on this forum has recommended, the awesome app TinyCam Pro is what you’ll need. It supports email notifications (with snapshots) on motion detection, it supports granular motion detection areas (much better than Wyze app), as well as record to SD card, record to FTP, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. There’s a ton of features in this app and it was on sale during Black Friday, so only $2.99 or something. Worth getting it even at full price.

Best thing of all, you can monitor multiple cameras with TinyCam Pro and can enable a web server to view the cameras live as well (you may need to set up port forwarding if you want to access the web server from a remote network, e.g. from your work office).

Anyway, now I can simply check my email for WyzeCam snapshots and this takes like 3 seconds. Much faster and more efficient than going through the app on my phone and then wait for it to download and then play a 5 second clip.

@uWaterloo, are you trying to capture an image based on motion activities occurring at a specific time of the day? E.g. if there is motion at 12pm, then capture image? Or are you trying to capture an image at exactly 12pm, regardless if there is motion or not? If it’s the first one, then you could set up TinyCam Pro with email notifications on motion detection. Unfortunately, TinyCam currently doesn’t support setting up a schedule for motion detection. So basically, it runs 24/7 and whenever it detects a motion, it’ll send out an email with snapshot (or take a recording and upload to FTP / Dropbox, etc. Depends on your TinyCam settings).

Then, once you have the emails with the snapshot, you could do some filtering on them. I use Gmail and you can do stuff like “older_than:2h”, which means only show emails that are older than 2 hours. You could probably do some granular filtering based on time and date.

If you are keen, you can even set up a Google Script that automatically fetches your emails (based on the Gmail label), then it’ll strip the email attachments to your Google Drive. You can then use Google’s Backup & Sync application and add your Google Drive account, then have it sync your Google Drive folders (you can specify just one folder to sync, instead of all folders in your Google Drive) to your PC. So essentially, you could just open a folder on your machine and look at all the attachments (snapshots) taken from your WyzeCam, without having to check your emails. I have multiple security cameras at home, both indoor and outdoor. I essentially check all my snapshots within one folder or if I am on the go, I can just check the emails. Quick and simple, no need to bother with 5 seconds of recording playback per camera.

Oh and here’s the Google Script I was referring to. Note that you can configure “Triggers” for Google Script, so that is another time-based setting that might help you, in addition to the Gmail filters.

4 Likes
7

Hi,

 

Apologies if this is a silly question, but I have not received my camera yet.

  1. Apart from App notifications, is it possible to configure Email Notifications when Motion is Detected?
  2. Can notifications be configured per camera?
Thanks
1 Like
9

Thank you for the speedy response, very helpful.

10

Know I’m resurrecting an old thread here, but I completely agree - this is a necessity. Right now I have one camera targeting my street… I won’t be able to purchase any future devices targeting my yard/interior unless/until an email/snapshot function is added.

Is there any movement on this roadmap feature, or has it stalled? If progressing, what dev/sprint release date is being targeted?

1 Like
11

Update on #2… Push notifications per camera is currently in beta and expected to be released publicly very soon.

1 Like
12

I strongly vote for this @chaoscreater for having the camera sends email notifications with snapshots, there are many reasons why (in addition to what have been mentioned):

  1. I setup the IFTTT to email me when motion is detected, and I was in a shopping centre using the available WiFi and received motion notification from IFTTT, but I couldn’t connect to the cameras (maybe the ports are blocked), so I had to switch to my mobile data and turn off the WiFi on my mobile,
  2. Its much faster to open the email and view the image inline rather than going to the App → notifications → Click on the video, waiting for 2 seconds to start and watch 30 seconds before the motion was detected. As you can see the user experience is not great with this approach (knowing that few seconds can make difference in case of intruder).

I think the email notification should be in the Firmware (camera connects to the SMTP rather than REST api), as this reduces the coupling between the camera and Wyze services. I bought IP security camera (called MustCam) 3 years ago, its brilliant and the only reason I am replacing it with Wyze cams is because of the high resolution and the motion tracking feature in Wyze cams, The MustCam has this email notification built-in and so handy , in fact the camera was so good that the camera software was connecting to the SMTP directly (not through web) and sends the email without any delays.

I feel (as being software engineer myself) adding this feature is not complicated at all, so I hope we can get this feature asap (I wouldn’t worry too much about the spams caused by false positives as this can be adjusted with the sensitivity over time).

Cheers,
Zaid

3 Likes
13

Hi Zaid,

Not sure if you read my reply a few posts up, but I recommend using TinyCam. It works really really well to my surprise. The detection sensitivity is awesome and it’s able to do pretty much everything I wanted.

The only thing you’ve got to watch out for is that when WyzeCam sometimes lose connection to the server, TinyCam will also fail to work. But that’s not really a problem with TinyCam though, after all, TinyCam relies on WyzeCam to function. If you ever run into that issue, try upgrading the firmware (doesn’t matter if it’s the same version) directly from this link:

https://user.wyzecam.com/upgradedevices

Also check out this link:

14

Hi,

In addition to mobile Push Notifications, can you add an option to enable receiving notifications via Email?

Additionally could the recorded video snippet be embedded as an attachment or a link included to download the video from AWS S3?

I would like to do some automation but until IFTTT support or APIs come out, email seems to be the quickest and easiest solution to implement.

 

Best,

Marlon

 

3 Likes
15

Great suggestion, Marlon! We’ll pass this on to the team, but just to clarify - are you looking to have an email for every notification there is? It might trigger some spam filters if there are too many.

16

For every notification but I hear your concern about the spam filters. Ideally I’d like to a webhook but I understand that’s more developer specific which probably isn’t top priority right now.

I actually want to run the image captured when motion is detected into image recognition software. Salesforce released software called Einstein that does object classification, see: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/03/introducing-einstein-vision.html

It would be a pretty cool project to integrate it into my WyzeCam.

 

 

1 Like
17

I recently contacted Wyze asking if this feature is available. Based on this feature request I’m assuming the answer is “not at the moment.” I’d like to add an important relevance to this feature. For some people, their job sites are secure and personal cell phones are not allowed on site. Unfortunately for them (including me), this means that there’s ~8 hours, 5 days a week, where they are unaware of anything going on in their dwelling.

18

This is my #1 priority: to enable email notifications when a movement is detected, with approx. 6 still pictures over 2-3 seconds from the camera.

I understand that could be a lot of messages but that is manageable thus:

For cameras that trigger a lot of false positives (typically those facing outdoors), set up an email rule to send this messages to trash. You can still review recent messages from those cameras if needed, until the email trash folder is emptied.

For cameras that generally don’t trigger false positives (generally indoor cameras) let those email flow into your inbox and get a notification on your phone. [The Foscam brand cameras do a nice job with notifications, although they’re a much larger form factor.] You guys might want to check those out.

The emails can also be configured not to download the pictures by default, thus minimizing data usage.

This feature is sorely missing from the Wyzecam, which is otherwise an excellent home security camera.

5 Likes
19

I agree and would like to be able to have the cameras email my google photos account.

So far we could not be more pleased with our cameras and just ordered 5 more!

1 Like
20

I agree with others, this should be a basic feature that should have been implemented since day 1.

I use 2 different cameras, a Dlink and a Belkin. Both support email on motion detection. My Dlink one even supports email on sound detection, or FTP upload of the image/video taken at the time. I can also choose the snapshot intervals, e.g. email on motion detection every 10 minutes. I can choose the amount of time to take the photo, e.g. 1 second after the motion is detected, or 2 seconds after. I can choose how many frames to take.

I think the ONLY reason why this isn’t implemented is because of the Cloud Storage subscription. They want us to pay for that instead. Email notification is so basic these days, I don’t know of any IP cams out there (apart from WyzeCam) that doesn’t support this.

Please add this feature and also add FTP support, so we can upload the photos to our own NAS or FTP solution. You can’t expect everyone to pay for the Cloud Storage subscription. For those of us who aren’t paying for that, we’ll risk losing any security footage or evidence. Imagine someone break into your house and sees the WyzeCam, disconnects the power and takes out the SD card, or just steal the camera entirely. You have no evidence to show to the police or whoever. But if we had email notifications via e.g. Gmail or whatever, the evidence is retained and we can use them.

Or, let’s just hope someone cracks the software and release a mod/tweak to enable these functions/features.

 

BTW, you need to tweak your forum a bit. If you don’t add a firstname and lastname to your Wyze account, the forum will automatically display your email address as the display name. I’ve already seen some users with their email addresses as the display name. This is a poor practice and for a company to specialize in IP cameras, dealing with security, this is rather concerning. I could easily spam someone’s email or sign them up on spam websites. You guys should seriously fix this by either hiding the email address, or generate a random unique display name for each user.

21

I agree. The best way for me is to get an email with 5 thumnails of the motion detected. I use IFTTT to save the attachments into a folder and i can view that folder when Im ready.

Video of the motion detection is nice but too time consuming THUS you miss the culprit in the mass of alerts