I’d like to have a battery powered WIFI camera that I can install outdoors. Ideally it would have motion detection as I am only interested if strangers move in my backyard, so continuous recording or live streaming of video is not necessary. However, I would like the camera to integrate with HA so the camera can be turned off when alarm system is off. I would also like that the pics or videos the camera takes are stored locally to my server.
Is there such cameras?
This is a couple of years old now but still good advice, https://youtu.be/RWJZa-u8OWk
And more recent: https://youtu.be/eGRgZWb5zx0
I use four Blink-XT cameras. Had to replace the batteries, finally, after 3 years. They work well with HA, you can store the video locally.
I might be OK also with mains powered WIFI cameras, but are there suitable brands of those?
As soon as you drop the battery requirement, there’s a ton of choice. All the usual big brands have outdoor wifi cameras. Amcrest, Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, Axis, they all have several models that support RTSP and ONVIF (which makes them easy to integrate into HA).
That said, if there is even the remotest possibility to have an Ethernet cable for the camera, then you should consider it. Wifi is really not great for security cameras. It’s not reliable, can be trivially jammed with stuff from Ali for only a few bucks and the camera is going to congest the RF channel due to its constant data stream. If you have mains out there, you could even consider a network powerline adapter, even that’s probably better than wifi.
from the guy everyone here loves (to hate)
I’m pretty happy with EufyCam, although I suspect I’m recharging every 6 months rather than the 12 months as advertised. Unless things have changed recently, the integration with HA is somewhat cumbersome, requiring installation of ioBroker to be able to turn the cameras on and off.
While they are wifi, it has its own network back to its own base station. The SD card is in the base station, so if somebody steals your camera, you will at least have the footage of it walking away.
It seems like Eufy requires use of its cloud service for control which is a no-go for me. I ended up ordering a Reolink E1 Outdoor which to my understanding should be operable without cloud, i.e. locally.
Thanks for the suggestions, though!