Getting previous snapshot, how to get current one?

[TheFern2]

I am most likely doing something wrong, I have an automation for motion, and it does work and the whole automation goes through it steps, however when it comes to saving the snapshot, it is saving the previous snapshot.

I posted a question in the HA forum I thought to post it here just in case someone knows. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/ring-mqtt-automation-with-doorbell-trouble-getting-snapshot-on-time/613999

As an example here are the last snapshots taken and saved to disk:

Below screenshot is from file 152317.jpg taken at 15:03:17, not file 150023, so for me clearly the automation is working because the snapshots are being taken but unsure why is grabbing the previous snapshot. Also I waited 5 or 10min and I always get the previous snapshot. Any help would greatly be appreciated.

alias: Ring door motion 1
description: ""
trigger:
  - type: motion
    platform: device
    device_id: 88398fd300452f135004ae0face90004
    entity_id: 813486f548cdd5d867c90d44c6e0710e
    domain: binary_sensor
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
  - type: occupied
    platform: device
    device_id: 88398fd300452f135004ae0face90004
    entity_id: 4925e1a4d8a97f32960e95af036c4e8a
    domain: binary_sensor
condition:
  - condition: time
    before: "22:00:00"
    after: "06:00:00"
action:
  - type: turn_on
    device_id: 88398fd300452f135004ae0face90004
    entity_id: 13f026ee621dc06b8a15d44e15b94dd5
    domain: switch
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 5
      milliseconds: 0
    enabled: true
  - device_id: 88398fd300452f135004ae0face90004
    domain: button
    entity_id: 8b44cc0d43257930db8f1fa49fafe754
    type: press
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 10
      milliseconds: 0
    enabled: true
  - service: camera.snapshot
    target:
      entity_id: button.front_door_take_snapshot
    enabled: false
    data: {}
  - service: camera.snapshot
    data:
      filename: /media/camera/frontdoor/camera_{{ now().strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S") }}.jpg
    target:
      device_id: 88398fd300452f135004ae0face90004
    enabled: false
  - service: camera.snapshot
    data:
      filename: /media/camera/frontdoor/camera_{{ now().strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S") }}.jpg
    target:
      entity_id: camera.front_door_snapshot
    enabled: true
  - service: notify.mobile_app_sm_n960u
    data:
      message: test fernando message
  - type: turn_off
    device_id: 88398fd300452f135004ae0face90004
    entity_id: 13f026ee621dc06b8a15d44e15b94dd5
    domain: switch
mode: single

[TheFern2]

Found some HA forum links with same issue lol, going to try to send two take snapshot actions and see if is a good workaround.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/camera-snapshot-strange-issue/507448/3
home-assistant/core#75930

[tsightler]

Why are you trying to manually take a snapshot instead of using builtin snapshot on motion capability? Are you triggering the automation from some other sensor.

[TheFern2]

Yeah I apologize for the messy automation and lack of description. You got it right, the switch on and off is for the stream I figured turning on could help. The take snapshots were just attempts to see if anything would change.

And all the disabled actions previous attempts.

I just canceled my subscription. I feel like I shouldn't have to pay for a freaking snapshot lol. I don't even care about the ai detection.

I will try to see if I can capture a snapshot from the stream, if that doesn't work I will replace the ring with something else. I'll look for HA compatible camera. Thank you.

[tsightler]

Well, you are not just paying for snapshot, you are paying for event history, cloud storage, etc. Indeed, if you don't care about these things or don't feel they are worth the value provided, then sure Ring devices are a poor choice for you.

You can of course start the stream, wait a few seconds for the stream to start, take a snapshot from the live stream, and stop the stream, but this will always create a delay of 3-5 seconds at best, it's only marginally useful for many cases. Good luck.

[TheFern2]

I could have sworn I had more features when we first bought it, because I've had it for years and I never needed the subscription. I want to say snapshots used to be free. Last year it was the first time I bought the subscription for a year because the snapshots stopped coming in. But honestly I shouldn't have to pay monthly for basic features, I feel like the whole capitalism world is exploding with everything subscription models.

I appreciate the help. A few seconds wouldn't be bad, I'll tinker with it and see if is acceptable. I have 24/7 cameras recording the house all locally which I can also trigger base on the ring motion.

[tsightler]

I don't own any of Rings low-power cameras, so they can all take a snapshot on-demand at any time anyway, but it's my understanding that rich notifications have always required a subscription and that was the only way for ring-mqtt to get a motion image from battery/low-power cams (the camera takes a snap just before starting to record and uploads that image to the cloud as part of the notification process).

Well, technically, back in the 4.x days of ring-mqtt, I had implemented logic to start a live stream and use ffmpeg to grab a still image from the stream, but this was never a perfect solution due to the delay and the fact that motion would constant cause all streams to be "answered", and recording would cause other events to be missed since Ring cameras don't notify while recording and on and on.

Users didn't understand all these limitations with Ring cameras, they just complained to me that ring-mqtt was broken and how they couldn't believe it worked this way, blah, blah, blah, and of course by far the loudest and most rude of the bunch were the ones that didn't want to pay for Ring, but they sure didn't mind using my free time.

Once we figured out how to get the image from Ring rich notifications, I dropped all support for this old method. I figured that anyone who doesn't want to pay for a subscription can write their own automation with ffmpeg and deal with the limitations themselves, which is exactly what you did, so thanks! Nice automation BTW!

My generic suggestion to most users is, if you don't want to pay a subscription, don't by cloud based devices. And, to be clear, I'm not criticizing anyone who doesn't want to pay subscriptions, I don't think a single Ring camera/doorbell is worth paying for either, there are great alternatives for that use case that don't require subscriptions.

For me the value prop of Ring is very different because I have 8 cameras as well as Ring alarm, and so I get professional monitoring and cloud recording for all of my cameras for $100/yr (grandfathered in price) but it also gives me >$100/yr savings on my home insurance for having monitored fire protection so it's easily justified. There's no other monitored alarm system that is even in the ballpark of this value, although I guess it's not quite as good for new users since it's like $200/yr now.

[TheFern2]

Oh I love when people complain to oss maintainers and want everything for free, as a maintainer myself of some libraries I totally understand your frustration with people not understanding limitation not set by you. I am 99% sure I used to get rich notifications when we bought it, I wouldn't have bought the subscription otherwise. At the time when they stopped coming in, I said wth $40 bucks is allright, so I paid for a year. I am wondering if this is when ring got bought out, who knows. Just looking on google there are a bunch of hits about notifications stop coming in last year. imho for a $100 dollar device, is insane that all I get now is a dumb text notification that basically tells me a fly/car/tree/ufo trigger a motion, that's ridiculous when you think about it. I did thought about getting another brand and replacing it but honestly 90% of them have subs, and they can always change their mind about removing free features also it hurts removing a $100 device which works hardware wise just fine. I think it might be easier to build my own since I have all the necessary skills both in hardware and software, and given the market I just might build a device that can do its own detection, we will see.

I totally get why the subscription is worth to some people, but subscription after subscription and it starts getting crazy. I have wyze cams around the house and they all record 24/7 to local sd cards, I just set one up with rtsp to also record a clip when the doorbell motion goes off. I did tried wyze subscription and their object detection wasn't all that great, I will setup my own models eventually but of course this stuff is fun for me. For cameras they all should have options other than cloud but of course they can't keep revenue coming in like that. If you take out object detection, you're basically paying just for cloud storage of your own generated video files.

Either way a few years ago, I didn't really pay much attention to what we bought, but nowadays most are crippled unless you have a subscription which is something I need to pay more attention going forward. Of course I am on a different tier because I can roll out a bunch of these custom automation myself.

[TheFern2]

This is what I ended up implementing if anyone is interested, also added the timestamp to the snapshot. Works pretty good for my requirements. There may or may not be something out there already but I am a lot quicker in python, than yaml files lol. Thanks for this wonderful addon!

https://gist.github.com/TheFern2/09fcb9d7d31559d9987c36cb30e28f8d