Email alert with link to video uploaded via FTP

[alexthefifth]

Hello all,

I really like the BI email alert feature, but since my email provider stores a copy of the email with the attachment I find myself frequently running out of mailbox space.

I'm wondering if it would be possible to have BI send an email with a LINK to the image/video, instead of attaching it?

The link would be HTTP. So I was thinking of having BI upload to FTP when motion is triggered. And then just setting up Nginx/Apache to serve that FTP folder via HTTP

Has anything like this ever been done?

 

[looney2ns]

Hello all,

I really like the BI email alert feature, but since my email provider stores a copy of the email with the attachment I find myself frequently running out of mailbox space.

I'm wondering if it would be possible to have BI send an email with a LINK to the image/video, instead of attaching it?

The link would be HTTP. So I was thinking of having BI upload to FTP when motion is triggered. And then just setting up Nginx/Apache to serve that FTP folder via HTTP

Has anything like this ever been done?

Why not use the BI mobile app and use push notifications instead?
Or
Setup your email program to delete the email on the server after download.

 

[alexthefifth]

Our workflow currently revolves around email. Having an an email is vital to us as we would like to be able to quickly share/forward the image/video. Having everyone install the BI app is not feasable (dealing with executives who would only need access to it once every few months). The email attachments work well for us currently, but the space requirements have us looking for someway to "link" to the images/video within the emails, instead of attaching them

I understand BI has a web interface that we can send people to, but I'd like to have the link point directly to the incident/alert in question. Does the BI email/web feature support this?

 

[jaydeel]

I had an idea and just experimented with using the macros &WAN and &ALERT in the body of the email to create a link to an alert, e.g., &WAN/alerts/&ALERT

While the macro &WAN resolved as expected to http://{address:port}, the macro &ALERT would not resolve to anything other than the text ’&ALERT’.

After a closer reading of the BI help pdf, I suspect I may have incorrectly assumed what the macro &ALERT is actually intended to return. I assumed it would be the alert’s database record filename. But it might be the path to hi-res alert image instead. I did re-test after checking the appropriate setting in the Triggers tab, but still no joy.

I‘ve emailed support for clarification.

 

[jaydeel]

I heard back from Ken today... his reply:

“Next release today will have &ALERT and &PLATE possible for all alerts where macros are supported. The &ALERT is the path to the JPEG if this is being saved as a high-res file. Otherwise, it will be the DB locator like @23423 which may be used to open the image from the database.”

i Just tried testing this... Now when I check the option to store hi-res alert files (on the Trigger tab), &ALERT is indeed now resolving the filename... and when I uncheck the option, &ALERT resolves the DB locator..... See the attached images for an example.

&YEA

 

[jaydeel]

Heads-up... the macros have been changed to &ALERT_DB and &ALERT_PATH

Click here for more.