Taking Snaps

Use this alert when you want snaps to be taken automatically on Motion/Noise detection. The snaps are saved as JPEG images, and you can choose to have them emailed to you. Every device in Security Monitor Pro has its own Alert settings and must be configured individually.

Select a device by clicking on its preview window. Click the Camera Monitoring Options button for the selected device.
On the Monitoring tab, make sure that When motion or noise is detected option is selected.
Under Select Alerts check the Take Snap option.
Click Configure to open up the settings window.
Configure the Alert by following the instructions below.
Click OK.

After this alert is selected and configured, you can start monitoring. When motion or noise is detected, Security Monitor Pro will start taking snaps. The snaps are saved in JPEG format, which provides good quality in a small size.

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. You may wish to create separate folders for each camera to make it easier to find a particular snap.

File Name Options

Prefix

When creating a JPEG file, Security Monitor Pro starts the file name with this Prefix. You should pick a meaningful prefix that will help you identify the files, like "MainHall" or "DisplayCase".

Append date and time to file name

When you select this option, then the program appends the date and time of when it took the snap to the Prefix specified above. This can make the snaps more useful as evidence.

Append numbers to file names

If you select this option, Security Monitor Pro appends 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 name of the snap file is just the Prefix. If a file by the same name is already present in the Snap Folder then the new file will overwrite the old file. That is, there will only ever be one snapshot stored on the hard disk. This option is often used along with uploading to create a "webcam page" on a server, with a constantly-updated image.

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 frames to skip between snaps. A video is essentially a series of still pictures (images). These frames appear one after another, giving the illusion of motion. The number of images per second is known as the frame rate of the video. If a video capture device captures at 10 frames per second (images are displayed at a rate of 10 frames in one second), and if you configure this Alert to record a snap of every image in the video and to take 5 snaps, they will only show half of one second of what happened after the Alert. To record more information, specify a value of 10, 20, 30 or 40 here. With a 10 frame per second video stream, one picture would be taken every 1, 2, 3 and 4 seconds, respectively.

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.