If your camera uses Event video history and experiences issues, you may find incorrect camera events, receive too many notifications or miss important activity.
If you need help troubleshooting 24/7 video history, refer to Troubleshoot CVR video history gaps or missing parts.
Event-based recording only records clips of important sound and motion events. There will be some dark grey areas in your timeline with 'No events detected' even when your cameras are on and streaming video. These grey areas are normal. Follow the steps below if your history didn’t report events that you expected your camera to detect.
Troubleshoot false events and undetected activity
Your camera detected something that wasn't important activity
Although your camera uses advanced learning algorithms to recognise important motion activity, things like fast-moving shadows and lights may still be detected as motion.
Things that sound or look similar to what your camera tries to detect may cause false alerts too. For example, your camera may detect people on your television as a real event in your home.
If your camera repeatedly detects shadows or light in the same area, you can set up Activity Zones to reduce the number of camera alerts that you get for that zone.
You can also try personalising your notifications for certain events in your Home app feed. Learn about the Feed in the Home app.
If you can’t remove the cause of the false alerts, you can turn off sound notifications for your camera or turn off its microphone with the app.
Something happened but your camera didn't pick it up
Follow the steps below to troubleshoot. After each step, check whether your camera can detect sound and motion by looking in the Home app’s Feed or the Nest app’s event history for new activity.
1. Check power, Internet connection and Wi-Fi
Your camera must have power in order to work. If your Internet connection or Wi-Fi is down in your home, your camera cannot notify you when it detects activity.
- If you have a wired camera or doorbell, check that power is on in your home and that your camera is plugged into a working power socket. If there are power issues for your home or socket, contact your electricity service provider for assistance.
- If you have a battery camera or doorbell, charge the battery if needed, or connect it to power.
- Make sure that your device is connected to your Wi-Fi network and the network is connected to the Internet. If your device is on but still says that it’s disconnected, troubleshoot Wi-Fi connection issues.
2. Check that the camera and microphone are on
The camera needs to be on for your camera to detect motion from things like people and vehicles. The microphone on your camera also needs to be on to detect sounds like talking or glass breaking.
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Turn on your Nest camera in the app.
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In the Home app home screen, touch and hold your camera's tile
tap Settings
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In the Nest app home screen, tap your camera
in the top-right corner of the screen
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If you have physical access to your Nest Hub Max, you can also turn on the camera in two different ways:
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Swipe up from the bottom of the display screen, then tap Camera. Your display will tell you whether you’ve turned the camera on or off.
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Toggle the switch on the back of the display. This will turn on both the camera and microphone.
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3. Make sure that the camera can spot the activity that you want
You may need to move your camera or change something in the camera’s view to improve motion detection results.
You can find detailed information about how to make the most of your camera if you have event recording.
Troubleshoot notifications
Your camera recorded activity but you didn’t get a notification
Change notification settings in the app. If notifications are turned on, check whether any similar activity has recently occurred in your camera’s video history. You shouldn’t continue to receive notifications for an ongoing event.
You get too many notifications
Use the app to change the following settings to reduce the number of notifications that you get from camera events.
Changing notification settings
You can change the types of notifications that you receive, when they can be sent, and even the kind of activity that you want to get notifications for. To learn how to change notification settings, go to our Troubleshoot camera alerts and Camera alerts articles.
Switch to Home mode
If you don’t want to receive notifications for activity that your camera detects while you’re at home, you can switch your home to Home mode with the app to turn the camera off. Your camera will not send you alerts for activity while the video stream is off.
There are a couple of ways to switch between Home and Away modes in the Nest app:
- You can manually switch to Away or Home mode to turn your camera on or off when you leave or come home.
- You can also choose whether each of your cameras can switch automatically when you leave or come home with Home/Away Assist.
Use Activity Zones
You can set your camera to only detect activity outside of a specific Activity Zone. That way, your camera won’t send you alerts for areas where there’s a typical activity that you don’t want to be notified about.
The interactive troubleshooter will help you quickly fix problems with missing video history.