Help
Camera
Monitor
Knowledge base
2021
2020
2019
I am having trouble accessing my camera via LTE cell service. I can view over Wi-Fi but when switched over it will open the loading page but never transitions into live mode. I have full bars so hoping there is a permission I may have overlooked?
The app should work on both Wi-Fi and LTE connection. If there is a problem on LTE, please check if there isn't any stream/media blocking application installed on your monitor device. This can be some kind of data-saving app or some firewall that blocks the connection. The application works for many users on LTE, so most probably this will be some device specific issue.
My app only works on Wi-Fi. My old phone it worked fine on 4g. Please let me know how to fix it.
If you have switched to new phone where the app doesn't work on mobile data, there must be some issue on the new phone. I have already had similar issues and in all cases there was some kind of data-saving application or firewall application pre-installed on the phone. Please check if there isn't something that blocks streaming over mobile data.
I recently added a new camera LG Stylo 6, but since then I cannot connect to my other phones now.
The fact that you have added a new camera couldn't affect the connecting to other cameras. There must be some internet connectivity issue which suddenly appeared at the same moment when you added the new LG camera. Please try to check the internet connectivity of other cameras, you can for instance restart the Wi-Fi router... I hope that should help.
Love your app so far but for some reason the slider for motion detect keeps turn off. Is there something I'm doing wrong?
This is most probably because you have reached the limit of maximum images per day. Please note that the first limit is 2000 images, after which you should receive a notification that the motion detection isn't setup correctly. After 3000 images per day the motion detection stops.
If you fire so many images, please setup a lower sensitivity or exclude some areas from motion detection.
It seems you can only record using the motion sensor part of the application. Is there any way to have full-time recording?
Actually not, this is not possible with this app. Also note that there is a limit of 3000 recorded images per day, so it cannot record the whole day.
I restarted the camera on both the transmission and receiving phone but it does not detect motions anymore. What do you think it could be the reason?
If you don't receive notifications about a movement, please check if there is a small square yellow icon in the top left corner in the camera preview on the main screen. This icon indicates that motion detection is on and running. If you don't see this icon then motion detection is off for some reason - it can be turned off, out of schedule or the "nearby" function is on.
One of my old phones is very bad at turning off the motion detection when I am nearby. Would it be possible to have a setting, turn off when I am on the same Wi-Fi network? I think this would work better because it does not depend on the ability of the old phone to locate itself. Also, being on the same Wi-Fi network is very similar to being nearby.
Originally I built the "nearby" function based on the same Wi-Fi detection. Unfortunately, it didn't work as expected due to massive battery-saving functions of modern Android devices. The phone simply doesn't connect to a Wi-Fi immediately, but after (sometimes long) delay. It was absolutely unreliable, so I switched to a standard Android built-in feature called Geofence, which is intended to detect when a phone is in some area (close to the camera in this application). You are right that this function isn't 100% reliable, but I hope that Google guys will further improve it in a future.
I was wondering if there is a way to quickly delete the motion detection images in large quantities?
Yes, you can long press a day title to mark all images and then delete them at once. You can also twice long press on an image to mark the whole bundle of images.
Someone deleted my whole night until the next morning. My question is - am I able to get the videos back?
I am sure that your images cannot be deleted by someone else, most probably it will be some technical issue, for instance lack of memory in the camera device - in that case the camera automatically deletes oldest images to make a free space for new images.
But I am sorry, what was deleted cannot be undeleted.
Hello how can I change between camera and monitor mode?
To change between monitor and camera go to the main menu and choose logout. You will be taken to the welcome screen where you can choose another mode.
The only problem I encounter is that I often cannot communicate with the camera: "Connecting to camera" appears, but the progress bar is stopped in the middle for more than 10 minutes and nothing else happens. I hang up and after 10 or 20 minutes I repeat the communication and everything works perfectly. Both the camera (4G) and the monitor (Wi-Fi) are connected to stable networks: when I cannot communicate, I test the connection and verify that it is active.
When the connection hangs in the middle of the yellow progress bar, the monitor didn't get a response from the camera for some reason. If this happens you can hang up manually (much sooner than after 10 or 20 minutes, let say after 30 seconds) and repeat the call. Unfortunately, I don't know the reason why the response from the camera doesn't reach the monitor. It normally doesn't happen, so I would guess it is some kind of networking issue.
I would like to use a different email to log in account with. Should I just uninstall and reinstall the application or can you change it for me?
All devices (cameras and monitors) that you have are locked with the email address you used as a login. There isn't any easy way how to move (for instance) camera from one account to another one. If you need to change the email address, I am afraid you will have to delete everything and start from a scratch.
I need to find all archives of a camera that was deleted. Is that possible?
If the camera was deleted, all the images were deleted as well, I am sorry.
Hi, I have bought and use your app. Now I am thinking to put my old Android phone on my boat for surveillance. But been in the open it might be stolen. My question is, does your app support external cameras like a borescope so that I can hide the phone and use this camera for viewing the area?
Unfortunately, the app doesn't have support for external cameras.
Long answer: Actually, Android phones doesn't natively support external cameras at all. For this reason, I think that also other similar security camera applications will not support this feature. USB camera support is prepared in Android system since version 10 (Q), but as far as I know only several phones really supports it (Samsung S10 does, but I didn't test it). I also had several emails from users which claimed that they were successfully using external USB cameras with my application, but then it turned out, that they had some non-standard Chinese phones, which surprisingly supported USB cams.
So connecting USB camera to Android phone isn't as easy as it should be. I hope this will change, but it is a future.
This problem has been with me for many months now. I have already factory reset each GSmart camera twice. But cameras or immediately notify about the lack of access to the video camera device. Or after some time. A week ago, I installed an application on the GSmart Rey R3 that restricted access to the camera. Granted access only for Security Camera CZ. While testing - everything worked. When installed in a regular place, soon there is no access again. On these GSmart android 4.2.2 Now I suspect the antiquity of the operating system, or the operating system itself under the command of google uses a video camera. This interferes with the application. I'm thinking of trying to get Root to prevent the operating system from using the camera. How do you think it will help?
It doesn't sound probably to me that the operating system holds access to the camera chip - that would be very weird behavior of OS. So I think that root of the device will not help. I also had a phone which sometime showed "cannot access camera" error message. In my situation, the camera chip sometime "freeze" and only restart of the camera helped. After months of testing, I had to throw the device away.
Hello there and thank you for the time you are taking to read this email. I have to know is the data on this app is stored or shared in any way because I want to put a security cam in my room (because of a broken window) and I often get undressed there so I don’t want my data and pictures to be shared in any way. Is it safe to use???
Thank you for your very important question. The data that camera records ARE NOT SHARED AHYWHERE. They are safely stored in private Google Cloud in one of his datacenter and secured by the best practices of Google company (so in a similar way like your Gmail). Until you actively share your camera with someone, no one has access to your data.
Please note, that the pictures are also stored in the camera itself. It is highly recommended to lock your camera device by PIN, gesture or any other way, so even when your camera device is stolen, no one can unlock the device.
I noticed that the application consumes about 1 GB per hour when watching the live feed. Is that normal?
I confirm that 1 GB per hour is normal. This is standard stream video consumption in HD resolution. If the bandwidth is lowered, the quality of the video stream would be insufficient. But you can switch off HD resolution in the camera settings, then the stream will consume about 60% less of data (so about 0,4 GB per hour). Generally, streaming video is data consuming process.
FYI - While I was adjusting the clock on my second camera (which never goes to sleep) I noticed that GPS was turned on. So I enabled GPS on the original camera that used to go to sleep (many times) and now it works fine. No more going to sleep!
Thank you for your feedback!
Do I have to connect my phone to electricity? Because once I disconnect from electricity then after 5 minutes the motion detection stops though the phone is charged.
The camera doesn't need to be connected to electricity all the time. It detects and records movements also when it is not plugged in and even when it is not on Wi-Fi. The problem is that you use modern Android devices as cameras, which try to be as much power efficient as possible. For this reason, the unplugged camera falls asleep and doesn't send you notifications about new movement. But it should send them as soon as it wakes up, then you should receive everything.
For this reason it is recommended to have the camera plugged to electricity all the time, but it is not a duty.
Why is there no sound?
As noted on Play store, the application records detected motion as a series of still images, not video. This is in contrast to all other similar apps on the market, which records motion as video. For some purpose recording still images can be better, but if you need audio, you will need to switch to another application, sorry.
I've added a camera recently and noticed that when the image is updated the displayed time "4 hours ago" most of the time while the first camera correctly shows "a minute ago".
I have checked your background profile in the application and it seems that one of your cameras model "SGH-I547C" has a wrong time set. The difference is about 4 hours, so it will be the problem. Please set up a correct time on your camera to fix the problem.
I want to know how to delete the images that are left so that they do not take up space on my device?
The camera deletes old images (older than 15 days) automatically. You can also delete images manually if you want - just long press on an image and then hit the trash icon. You can also long press on day title to mark all images of that day and then delete them at once.
If I buy the application on how many devices can I install it?
You can install the application on as many devices you want. You can have more cameras and also more monitors. Everything will work together as long as you use the same login account on all the devices.
You don't need to buy the application - you can have several devices even in free version.
Not impressed. There's a 15 second pause between shots. Also camera freezes for unknown reason.
The camera normally takes images each 2 seconds. If your camera has longer period, it could be caused by long focusing procedure. Please would you try to setup a manual focus to see if the delay improves? This can be done in the camera settings - Advanced - Focus.
Having issues with connecting Samsung S10+ to my Samsung Tab 6, it detects motion but randomly doesn’t let me to watch live video.
If it drops the video connection randomly, there must be some connectivity issue from camera to internet or from internet to your monitor device. The most common thing is the bad connection between internet and the camera. I would recommend to restart the Wi-Fi router to see if the stability improves.
Please also note that the application uses video server that at location that is the closest to your language settings. For instance, if your language settings is American English, the app uses a video server in US. If the language of your monitor device is British English, the app uses video server in Europe, etc. Because it is advantage for video signal transfer to use the closest video server as possible, it is recommended to set the language settings on your monitor device depending on your real location.
Will this application work with my Swann outdoor cam?
Unfortunately, this app doesn't work with third-party cameras.
"Turn off when I'm nearby" is not working. Also, how can I delete all those images already there? There app allows me to turn camera off only.
You can delete all images of one day if you long-press on the day title (this marks all images of the day) and then hit the delete icon.
The function "Turn off when I'm nearby" is sometimes slow on devices with Android 8 and newer, because these modern Androids save as much power as possible. Due to this, position detection is sometimes slower.
How can I turn off camera shutter sound off?
The application by default turns off the shutter sound. But if your camera produces the shutter sound, then I am afraid it is somehow hardcoded into the camera's hardware and it cannot be turned off.
Btw. until now I didn't receive any complains to shutter sound, so I hope this is really some device specific issue.
Can you tell me how much Internet data consumes this application?
This app was built especially to be data economical. It sends over internet only low resolution images, each about 30 kilobytes, so each 100 images costs you about 3MB of data. I originally created this app to work in exteriors on mobile data, so it is designed to be economical.
I have tried a number of applications, however Security Camera CZ has a bad connection, and the connection is often lost.
I am very sorry about your negative experience with my application. It should work on all networks (Wi-Fi and cellular), and it works for many users. I don't know any details about your network conditions, so it is very difficult to give you any valid advice. The most basic thing what you can do is to restart your Wi-Fi router and the cell phone. It very often helps. Sorry I cannot give you any better advice.
The images get out of focus. I already tried changing the pixels but it doesn't fix it. How can I solve this issue?
The application uses autofocus as a default setting, so the image should be focused. In rare cases, when you need to focus to a different distance, you can go to the camera settings - Advanced - and change the focus manually.
For the past 2 days the phone I use as a camera for this app has been saying "can’t access image sensor". How can I fix this problem as it is connected to the home Wi-Fi?
This message appears when there is some hardware problem on the camera phone. Some older devices are already a little bit tired for the hard work of this application. You can clean this error by hard restart of the camera device, but I am afraid that the message re-appear after some time.
You can also try to make a factory reset of the phone, it sometimes helps. Please also note, that there can be only one application at the time which access the camera sensor.
It would be very nice if you could zoom and pan on a current screen that you are watching. It doesn't do much use whenever you have to record something first to zoom and pan at the same time. With all else fixed this is my one big hang up that no apps seem to take care of. Also for true security it is one of the most vital. If you can't zoom in to what's going on down in the corner on the live feed what's the use whoever is robbing, you are probably gone by the time you recorded it gone back found it captured it.
The off-center zoom is already implemented, but it works only on phones (cameras) which hardware natively supports off-center zoom. Technically speaking, the device/phone's camera must support HARDWARE_LEVEL_3 and "free-from cropping type". I hope there will be more and more phones which natively support this, I agree it is very important feature.
Btw. you can check the hardware level of your device, if you install for instance this tiny app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hvt.camera2test
and check for a line "android.scaler.croppingType". If there is value "1", then the off-center zoom is supported and will work in both video and motion detection.
How to set a schedule from 18.00 to 6:00?
To set schedule from 18:00 to 6:00, please first setup schedule from 18:00 to 0:00 and then setup a second schedule (for the next day) from 0:00 to 6:00. The camera will continually work from 18:00 to 6:00.
Is there something I can do to fix this space issue with the Sec Cam CZ app? For me it already shows 4.5GB space occupied. Is there some data I could delete?
The application (on the camera side) stores locally all taken images in high resolution (in the phone or SD card). If you want, you can
1) lower the high resolution of images (let say to 2MPx), so images will be smaller
2) setup the camera, so it will store hi-res images in Google Drive, not locally
3) setup the camera, so it will not take so many images, i.e. setup lower sensitivity or exclude some areas from motion detection.
Any of these action will save you space in the camera.
I installed this Security Camera CZ and have been using it on several of my old cell phones for over a week. I like very much the functions provided, and I do think still high resolution pictures serves the purpose very well. I'd like to keep using it, but there is one annoying issue that the app crashes my cellphones at least once a day. When it happens, I have to hard press the power button for long time to restart the cellphone. Can you please help to fix the issue?
I have two LG LS620 and two LG VS450PP having the issue. The two models are basically same with 1GB memory and 2 GB storage, and I have 32GB memory card attached to both phones. I tried using less resolution image setting (3MB, 4:3), but this does not help on this issue. The full resolution setting is 5MB, 4:3.
Your issue is a little bit mystery for me. If you have 4 phones and all of them are crashing regularly, I don't know what to say. True is, that rarely, on some old phones the application can crash, but I haven't heard that the whole phone would freeze. And you have 4 (!) phones in this situation.
How exactly looks the situation when you have to hard-restart the phone? The phone doesn't react to touches? Or you can run the application, but it immediately crashes? Or you can run the application, it works, but doesn't make any photos?
When the camera detects movement it takes a few still photos. Is there a setting that will take video instead?
This app, contrary to all other similar apps on the Google Play, records motion as a series of still images, not video, sorry. I state it on Google Play as much clear as possible. This app was created as an alternative for people that prefers stills to videos for some reason.