Take a manual photo/snapshot?

[buckerschris]

Hi,

New user here, having just bought a "Amcrest 4K UltraHD PoE Outdoor Security Camera (IP8M-T2499EW)".

I've setup Amcrest Cloud and can view the live camera on my PC and Android phone (albeit with a noticeable 10 second live delay?).

I'm looking to take manual photos/snaphosts every 10 minutes, with the aim of making a timelapse video using each still. Is this possible? How would I do this?

Thanks,

Chris.

[longedge]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

I have one of my cameras dedicated to looking at the sky (for my weather station page ) and I have been experimenting with this for some time now.

This is one I did a few days ago https://youtu.be/yG8WHJSyTXI. That's with snapshots every half hour but I've found that about 5 - 10 seconds produces good results for normal timelapse.

In order to grab the individual stills, I built a little app that uses the camera's cgi interface and makes calls at intervals that I set before running the app " http://username:password@ipaddress/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi ". I found that when you make this call, not only is the snapshot returned but the camera also saves a copy in whatever folder you have configured as the destination folder for snapshots in the camera settings. I can later go back and copy them from that folder (in my case on my NAS).

I turned off all the events in the camera settings so that I don't inadvertently get odd snapshots mixed in with my timed ones.

I'm not aware of any way to do this sort of thing natively.

[buckerschris]

Hi, and thanks for the quick & detailed reply.

That's brilliant. I've just tried going to the "snapshot.cgi" manually via a browser and it does indeed bring up a photo. I'm a web developer by trade so it shouldn't be too tricky to get this working as you've described above.

I'll see how I get on!

Much appreciated.

[longedge]

That's great, I'm glad it's working for you.

I do a number of other things with my app which don't lend themselves to html so I haven't tried it but I imagine that a very simple html page with a suitable refresh tag would work.

[jack7]

Longedge,
You wrote "I'm not aware of any way to do this sort of thing natively."

Here's how I"ve done it natively in the past to store snapshots on SD card.
In camera Web UI:

snap1.JPG (45.08 KiB) Viewed 4606 times

snap2.JPG (56.92 KiB) Viewed 4606 times

Set up General(green) time periods to capture snapshots in Snapshot Schedule.

snap3.JPG (89.2 KiB) Viewed 4606 times

In Amcrest View Pro to batch export any or all snapshots from SD card to PC, go to Playback, click Event, click camera, enable Picture, select time frame, Search, select snapshots to export, click Export (1st icon at bottom right), and select folder to export to.

snap4.JPG (199.35 KiB) Viewed 4606 times

[longedge]

@jack7 - Yes, point taken and indeed I tried that myself initially but the results were not accurate/reliable in terms of timed intervals. I was also getting snapshots triggered in other ways and although the naming convention used by the camera gives an indication of what the event was I then had to parse all the files to delete those I didn't want. That's why I mentioned turning off all events.

Evenly spaced snapshots result in a smoother video when editing and I can take very accurately timed snapshots between about 3 seconds upwards. The longest that I've actually used was half an hour but theoretically there's no upper limit and it's timed to the millisecond.

[jack7]

Longedge,
I think your HTTP snapshot program is great and well thought out. I guess my last post tutorial was posted more for people who can't or don't want to write code . The ASP screen I posted shows all the snapshots at 15 seconds intervals as I had specified. I just tried 1 second intervals for a while and then 5 minute intervals. Results looked fine. I am using a SD card. Perhaps your inaccurate results were because you were using FTP or NAS, or competing with other events recording on the same storage device. Just guessing...

Jack

[johnmac78]

I realize this is an older post, but I have IP8M-T2499EW camera and have not been able to get the snapshot function to work. I am using IPTIMELAPSE, which works fine on other brands of IP cameras, including a different Amcrest camera.

Amcrest support says there is no Command for snapshots, but when I first set it up, it was downloading pictures, then just stopped. This is the command I am using, with my username and password in place of username and password.

http://username:[email protected] ... apshot.cgi

I have tried just about every possible combinations with no luck. Any suggestions

[WoodchuckVT]

IPTimelape Pro (iptimelapse.com) is an absolute must for anyone who wants to create timelapse videos or wants to post their IP camera images to a website. It is specifically designed to capture the current IP camera image (snapshot) using a cgi command. It includes an FTP function for sending individual images or timelapse movies to your website. You can test it out for 7 days, and only costs $79.00. Too many features to list here. I use it with an old Axis IP camera to, at the end of the day, automatically create a timelapse of the day's weather sky view, and post it to my website: