Camera.snapshot only captures black frame

Configuration
1

I have a couple of Nest cameras on my network. I’m able to see them and stream from them via Home Assistant w/o issue. I can add a live stream to my dashboard if I wish and that works fine. However, one of the cameras is battery only and w/event-based triggering the battery lasts several months. Given that it is battery powered I don’t want it to constantly be streaming, running the battery down.

My thought was to create an automation to capture a snapshot every 5 minutes, overwriting the previous snapshot and displaying that in the dashboard. I have the following automation created:

alias: Front Door Snapshot
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: time_pattern
    minutes: /5
action:
  - service: camera.snapshot
    data:
      filename: /media/camera/frontdoor.jpg
    target:
      entity_id: camera.front_door_camera
mode: single

The automation will fire every 5 minutes and create the file, but it is always a black frame. I had first thought that maybe this was an issue due to the camera being battery-powered, but I have a wired camera of the same model as well, and the behavior is the exact same.

I can see the files in the target directory, I can browse to them via “Media Sources” in the left nav, but they’re always a black frame, always 2689 bytes in size.

Does anyone have any tips or pointers that could lead me in the right direction?

2

same issue - already tried a bunch of things.
I’m starting to believe that the nest cam is just incapable of handling snapshot by trigger.

3

I don’t think this is related to Nest cameras. I have 5 Generic Camera entities pointing at RTSP streams and whenever I take a screenshot of any of them I get a black square.

4

Looking further into it, it looks like the Nest cameras aren’t capable of the screenshot trigger.

@valantur I’d guess that the RTSP cameras might be a different issue though.

5

Did you get this working? I am in the same boat and see only black snapshots being generated. I have older wired Nest doorbell.