How on-device events work
Motion turns into a captioned event without a single frame leaving your device.
Motion to event
- 01A camera reports motion over ONVIF while the app is open and monitoring.
- 02The app grabs a snapshot from the camera, or the current live frame.
- 03Classification runs on your device: person, vehicle, animal or plain motion.
- 04A short caption is written and the image is stored in app storage.
- 05Cooldown, retention and the storage cap apply. Alert settings change notifications, not what's kept.
No cloud AI
Nothing is uploaded for detection or captioning. Newer devices can polish the caption on-device; every device gets a simple local caption.
What stays put
- Event snapshots never go to your photo library on their own.
- Share and Export to Photos are deliberate taps. Export makes a copy and warns you that Photos may have its own cloud sync.
- Resolution and retention follow your global or per-camera settings. Oldest images go first when the cap is hit.
- Event history is excluded from device backup. It's not meant as a permanent archive.
Proven so far, and what isn't
- A field run captured and classified 1,129 events over 3.5 days on eight cameras, using 71 MB.
- Events are captured while the app is open. Round-the-clock history needs the Hub, which records whether or not a phone is awake.
- People, vehicles, common animals and motion work. Package detection needs its own model.
- Retention pruning, the 2 GB cap, distant people and bursts across 16 cameras still need field testing.
- Captions leave out anything uncertain. No colour is claimed in fog, IR or bad light.