Taking Snaps

Use this alert when you want snaps to be taken automatically on Motion/Noise detection. The snaps are saved as small sized JPEG images, and you can choose to have them emailed to you. This alert must be selected during a For a Web Server Hosting a Web Site type of surveillance setup, where you need to display an image from your webcam on your website.

Under Run Alerts on the Quick Settings pane, make sure that When motion or noise is detected option is selected. Select this option if not already selected.
Under Which Alerts do you want to run? check the Take Snaps option.
Click Configure to open up the settings window.
Click OK.

After this alert is selected and configured, you can start monitoring. Depending on the configuration, when motion or noise is detected, WebCam Monitor will start taking snaps. The snaps are saved in JPEG format.

Configuring the Alert

Output Folder

Location of the snap folder

Select the folder to which all snaps are saved. During motion or noise detection, this Alert will create a new file for every Snap it takes in this folder.

File Name Options

Prefix

The Take Snap alert generates file names with the prefix specified here. You can then choose to append a date and time or a sequential number to this prefix.

Append date and time to file name

When you select this option, then the Take Snap alert will append the date and time of when it took the snap to the Prefix specified above.

Append numbers to file names

If you select this option, then the alert will append a sequential number to the Prefix specified above. Under this option if you check Cycle numbers from 1 to ... then you can specify the maximum sequential number that you want the alert to reach, after which the sequential number wraps and starts counting up from 1 again. This is a good way to limit the number of snaps.

Overwrite existing file

When you select this option the snap file is generated with the same name as specified in the Prefix. If the file by the same name is already present in the Snap Folder then the new file will overwrite the old file. This setting is required for a Web Server Hosting a Web Site type of surveillance setup.

Snap Settings

Number of Snaps

Specify the number of snaps that you want to take every time the Take Snap alert is triggered.

Take Snap after every

This number specifies the number of samples in the video received from the current capture device to skip before taking the next snap. A video is composed of frames that are essentially images. These frames, also called as samples, are shown at some rate to produce motion. This rate is known as the frame rate of the video. A video capture device typically captures at 10 frames per second (images are displayed at a rate of 10 frames in one second). If you configure this Alert to snap every image in the video then 5 frames will not go beyond the first second of video and will convey hardly any information. To gain more information, specify a value of 10, 20, 30 or 40 here, to skip these many frames generating an approximate snap interval of 1, 2, 3 and 4 seconds respectively with a 10 frames per second video.

JPEG Quality

Snaps are saved in the JPEG format. You can specify a quality between 25 to 100. Lower quality values produces smaller JPEG file sizes.