Grid View - Not Just a Desire but a Requirement for Serious Work
It was posited that some users merely "liked" the grid view in Security Spy. I am writing to state grid view isn't merely a desire or preference, but rather a necessary function for SS performing serious security duties.
Perhaps an actual example of how I have needed to use SecuritySpy would help make this evident.
I was asked by a police detective to check whether a matching Jeep Cherokee came through our neighborhood after a nearby armed robbery. Three armed thugs had broken down a front door and held people at gunpoint and demanded access to their safe.
The search period of interest was just over a week and would include footage from five cameras in my SS system. Even coning that down to automobile captures, that was 5 cameras x 150 captures/day x 10 days. That meant I needed to visually cull through 7500 thumbnails to get a quick check for Jeep Cherokee of interest. Police needed results quickly, as the vehicle would likely be soon abandoned.
I could do that task reasonably with the V5 grid. I could display screen after screen of thumbnails and look for Jeep Cherokees. Going through 7500+ thumbnails isn't unusual when I do serious searches through security captures. It takes some time, but WAS doable.
Now, with the five or six at a time, single column display in V6 web interface, that task is unreasonable to perform. It's not just a matter of there being so few on screen at a time, but scrolling makes the images moving targets and not even easy to page accurately through each set. This SECURITY review task is rendered basically impossible by the V6 web interface.
A grid view of captures is NOT JUST A PREFERRED VIEW style, but rather a powerful and NECESSARY function for performing serious security capture reviews with Security Spy.
Comments
I'd like to echo the need for a better way to short through captured files. I don't have the same use case as this poster, but I really dislike the new method of looking through captures.
Thanks for the additional feedback. We are planning to add the grid view back in a near-future update.
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Agree with this. Thanks for working on it, Ben.
Meanwhile, beta 6.1b8 has the legacy grid playing back video correctly now.
It is a workable solution for now, and even runs faster than the grid did in V5
I am urgently waiting for the Grid View in version 6. The feature is missing in the current beta version. Where can I find the beta 6.1b8 mentioned by guykio?
Hi @pdm if you go to the /legacy subdirectory you can access the entire legacy web interface, including the old grid view (just make sure you're using version 6.1 or later, as this fixes a bug with this, which is what guykuo was referring to above).
This should be a useful stopgap until we add the grid view back to the new SecuritySpy 6 web interface, which will happen in the near future.
Hi Ben: Thank you very much for your quick help!
Just to follow up on this: version 6.4 has just been released, and includes a grid view for captured files via the web interface. You can get the new version via the Registration section in the Settings window of your current software, or via the SecuritySpy download page.
Click the main menu in the web interface (just below the SecuritySpy icon, top-left), and select the "Web Interface Options" for this (and other) display settings.
Yes, I'll have to give this a good tryout
Is it possible to save a "view" so that I have a shortcut to get straight to the "Captures" view with certain outdoor cameras pre-selected (and others not) so that I can jump to the interesting events of the previous night during my morning cup of coffee?
Hi @jimmyjohnson - not exactly, however you could achieve something similar with groups. The web interface will remember which cameras are selected, separately for the Live and Captures page, and separately for each group that you create. So, you can set up a group containing the most important cameras that you frequently need to view, and leave them all selected under the Captures page. Next time you select that group, your selection of all these cameras will be maintained.