Failed to load attachment Response could not be serialized, input data was nil or zero length. iOS Notification from an image/video from UniFi Protect - What is this error and how to fix?

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
1

What does this error mean and does anyone have recommendations for the fix?

“Failed to load attachment
Response could not be serialized, input data was nil or zero length.”

511d56b92540bd010520e6b57bba32ae331e812f_2_1058x1000
511d56b92540bd010520e6b57bba32ae331e812f_2_1058x10001058×1000 91.6 KB

I’ve been using the UniFi Protect Blueprints for a few years, which have been generally great. One of my 12 cameras started reporting this error when pushing notifications to my iOS devices, so I posted this last year, but I haven’t found anything helpful in resolving the issue.

Now it seems the issue has gotten worse, which may be due to some change in UniFi Protect. What’s happening is that when the automation detects a person or vehicle, it will sometimes find the snapshot and send it correctly to my iOS device, but within a few seconds, the snapshot in the iOS notification is changed to this “Failed to load attachment” error. And it’s not consistent across cameras.

I also understand this Blueprint is no longer maintained by the author, so I’m evaluating options. I liked how this one would originally show a snapshot in the notification and then play the clip with a long press, but I may just have to revert back to an easy snapshot notification. Any ideas?

2

I am in the same boat. My notification just won’t show any images, and if I hold on it won’t show any actions anymore. Not sure what happened and what to do.

3

I find out that this happens only when I am local to the network where ha and ui are.

When away from the house it works as expected.

4

Interesting! I wonder if there’s a workaround for that?

I’m here 99% of the time, so it does this regularly for me.

5

I’ve convinced myself that this is a race condition. Here’s the modified blueprint that I’m using (simplified for iOS only): UniFi Protect Detection Notification Blueprint · GitHub

I narrowed this down to a race condition by sending the notification, captured from the automation trace that triggered the error, a little bit later. In that case, it works. So, the nvr_id and event_id are correct and available. Just not when the notification was sent.

By waiting for the sensor to be in the off state for 10 seconds, I almost never see the error.

I suspect this is a bug in the integration and/or a limitation of the Unifi Protect API.

6

Interesting. I’ll give this a try.

I’ve been using the Smart Detection variant that provided a few more options via the blueprint. The original creator of the blueprint is no longer contributing, but this post has the latest version of it.

I’m wondering if adding this 10 second waiting buffer may help improve this version as well. I’ll try to dig into that over the next few days.

7

Older post, but still wondering what the end status is of your findings.

8

The delay improved the situation for me but didn’t resolve it completely. I switched to using notifications via the Protect app and Alarm Manager instead. Alarm Manager supports suppressing recurrent notifications now and that was my primary reason for rolling my own notifications.