Feature request: expose folder mode (non-Frigate) in the Home Assistant app #31

Activity

1. NerdyHank commented on Oct 6, 2026

   

   NerdyHank

   on Oct 6, 2026

   Contributor

   More actions

   Built — thanks for the precise report, and sorry it sat for two weeks.

   You identified all three parts correctly, and the third is what made the other two pointless: even a hand-written folder path could not have worked, because the app never mounted /media or /share at all.

   #35 adds:

   • frigate_url may be left empty — an empty URL means no Frigate, and the gallery, unknown review and history stay usable
   • /media and /share mounted read-only (FaceID never changes or deletes what it watches)
   • eleven folder_* options

   For your setup:

   frigate_url: ""
   folder_enabled: true
   folder_path: /media
   folder_camera: driveway
   folder_extensions: [".jpg"]

   Two things worth knowing before you try it:

   folder_extensions replaces the default list rather than adding to it, and that default is video-only. Your .jpg files would be skipped in silence without that line. This caught someone else already.

   One folder_camera applies to the whole folder. Yours is the case where that matters: five cameras writing front.jpg, driveway.jpg and so on into the same /media would all report under one sensor. If you want sensor.faceid_front and sensor.faceid_driveway separately, give each camera its own subdirectory for now — one folder watcher per camera is not supported yet. Tell me if that is a blocker and I will look at per-file camera mapping.

   Your overwrite pattern works, and I measured it rather than assuming: the fingerprint is file size and modification time, not the name, so front.jpg replaced on every event counts as a new recording each time. Three overwrites, three recognitions, one index entry — pinned as a test.

   One caveat about the images themselves: 2560×1440 is plenty of pixels, but what matters is how wide the face is in them. If people are far from the camera the face can still land under min_face_px (default 48). The Tools tab has a Why do events yield no face? report that counts the reasons instead of guessing — worth running once you have a few events in.
2. NerdyHank

   closed this as completedin #35on Oct 6, 2026
3. NerdyHank commented on Oct 6, 2026

   

   NerdyHank

   on Oct 6, 2026

   Contributor

   More actions

   Shipped in v0.25.0 — folder
   mode is now a first-class input in the Home Assistant app.

   What you asked for, and what the app was missing: frigate_url may be left empty, /media
   is mounted (read-only) so an FTP upload target is actually visible, and eleven folder_*
   options are in the add-on configuration — folder_path, folder_camera,
   folder_recursive, folder_process_existing, folder_extensions, folder_poll_interval,
   folder_settle_seconds, folder_max_frames, folder_max_people_per_file,
   folder_max_indexed_files and the folder_enabled switch.

   Two things worth knowing for your setup:

   • Only /media and /share are visible to the app. Home Assistant mounts nothing else,
     so a path like /config/snapshots or a host directory cannot be read no matter what you
     type. The add-on now warns on start when folder_path does not exist inside the container
     and names those two roots, because that is the likeliest mistake.
   • The camera sensor appears at startup, not after the first recognition. A folder has no
     camera list to query, so the name comes from folder_camera. Without that a fresh install
     looked like it was doing nothing for the first hour.

   Still-image extensions work (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp) but the default
   folder_extensions list is video-only — set it explicitly if your Reolinks upload stills.

   Closing this as done; reopen or file a new issue if the five-camera setup hits something.
4. Alien10140

   added a commit that references this issue on Oct 6, 2026

   Offer the folder input in the Home Assistant app

   ...

   7173f01
5. kedziu commented on Oct 6, 2026

   

   kedziu

   on Oct 6, 2026

   Author

   More actions

   Thanks a lot for shipping this! I'm migrating from the standalone LXC install to the app (v0.25.1), and hit one snag:

   frigate_url can't actually be left empty in the HA app.

   The add-on ships frigate_url: http://192.168.1.10:5000 as its default option, so clearing the field in the UI and saving just restores that default.

   Suggestion: add an explicit toggle, mirroring folder_enabled:

   frigate_enabled: true # default, keeps existing installs unchanged
   frigate_url: http://... # only used when frigate_enabled is true