Pictures, video and sound
Settings › Device Notification Settings decides how alerts look and sound on this iPhone. This iPhone only Everything on it is yours alone: other people’s alerts and the server don’t change.
Frigate writes recordings in 10 second segments, and a clip cannot be cut until the segment covering the end of it has been closed and indexed. Asking sooner returns a clip that is silently too short rather than an error, so the app waits instead.
If you dismiss the alert before the video arrives, it does not reappear.
- Delivery: Break through Focus, and the alert sound.
- Focus Filters: see Focus Filters.
- Media: the picture and video in each alert.
- Picture Description: AI descriptions written on this iPhone.
- Wording: what an alert says.
- Labels: labels to leave out of everything the app tells you.
- Variables: what the wording can include.
- How an alert reads: your wording, filled in for an example.
- Stop Notifications on This iPhone: stop all alerts to this iPhone.
Picture and video
Section titled “Picture and video”| Setting | To begin with | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Picture | On | Puts the frame the camera saw in the alert. Off makes alerts text only, and the app doesn’t contact your server when one arrives. |
| Close-up picture | Off | Uses a close-up of what was detected, without the box Frigate draws, instead of the whole frame. |
| Upgrade to video | On | About 25 seconds after the alert, replaces the picture with a short clip of what happened, silently, without a second buzz. Needs Picture. |
| Alert first, then add the picture | Off | If the picture is slow, the alert appears without it and the picture is added a moment later, without a second sound. |
Why the video waits: Frigate writes recordings in 10-second pieces, and can’t cut a clip until the piece covering its end is finished. Asking any sooner gets a clip that’s silently too short, so the app waits instead. If you dismiss an alert before its video arrives, it doesn’t come back.
Alert first is worth turning on if your server is slow to reach away from home: the alert is never held up waiting for a picture. It’s also needed for describing alert pictures, so that writing a description never delays an alert either.
The picture and the video come from your server, so away from home they need your Away address. Video uses mobile data when you’re not on Wi-Fi: if that matters, turn Upgrade to video off.
Alert sound
Section titled “Alert sound”A camera alert that sounds like a text message is one you learn to ignore, so give it a sound you don’t hear all day. Settings › Device Notification Settings › Alert sound:
- Tap Import sounds from iOS. iOS gives apps no way to list its own alert tones, so this copies them into the app. Nothing is downloaded.
- Tap a sound to hear it and choose it. Find a sound searches the list.
- To use a sound of your own, tap Import a sound file and pick it in Files. It has to be WAV, AIFF or CAF, and under 30 seconds.
Default is whatever iOS uses for notifications.
Hide labels you never want to hear about
Section titled “Hide labels you never want to hear about”Some things Frigate tracks you never want named: a PIR or door sensor reported as a label, or an object your cameras always see. Labels, under Mention by name, lists every label your cameras track. Switch one off to leave it out of the wording of alerts, the camera list, Review and the timeline.
- It’s still detected and recorded exactly as before: this changes only what you’re told.
- It doesn’t stop alerts. An alert for a hidden label still arrives; it just doesn’t name it. To stop the alerts, set the object to Don’t alert in a notification filter.
- A camera whose only recent activity was a hidden label reads Motion, so the time still says honestly that something happened.
- A recognised name, such as a face or a plate, is dropped along with its label, unless something else in the same alert was recognised: Frigate doesn’t say which object each name belongs to.
Stop all alerts to this iPhone
Section titled “Stop all alerts to this iPhone”Stop Notifications on This iPhone, at the bottom, tells the notification relay right away to stop sending this iPhone alerts from your server. It’s a real stop, not a setting: you stay signed in, everything else keeps working, and nothing changes on the server or for anyone else. To get alerts again, run Settings › Server Notification Setup, which registers this iPhone afresh.
With more than one server, the button names the server you’re looking at, and stops only its alerts. Removing a server in Settings › Connection does the same, and forgets the server too.