Getting old camera.snapshot image in an automation

Configuration
1

I’m doing a cool thing that used to work without fail, but increasingly I have been running in to a weird problem. I guess I am trying to figure out not just how to fix the problem but also learn a bit more about how home assistant automations work. Here’s what I am doing:
Trigger: Garage door changes state to “closed”
Actions:

  • camera.snapshot image capture of the crappy old ip cam pointed at the car bays and garage door (static filename, so it overwrites the old photo)
  • send image to Google AI asking it to describe how many cars are in the picture and whether the garage door is open or closed
  • send message to my phone with the AI response plus the photo so I can see for myself
  • send message to my wife’s phone with the same content that I sent myself.

The problem is that I am often getting an old photo. For example, I drive off, close the garage door, and the message we receive is that there are two cars. The attached photo has two cars. I return, park the car and close the garage door, it sends me a photo of only one car and a description that says the same.

It used to work all the time, now it rarely sends a correct photo.

So I added a 15 second delay between camera.snapshot and the Google AI API call, no improvement.

Questions:

  1. Does HA run actions in parallel? That is, does the camera.snapshot need to terminate successfully before the next action begins? When I look through the trace, I can not see the time that an action finishes or exactly when the next action begins. Just the start time and the completion time.
  2. Looking in /config/home-assistant.log shows very little - should I change the log level to something more verbose, or should I look elsewhere?
  3. Does HA cache images somewhere?
  4. Where would I look to find a log entry showing me the start time and end time of the camera.snapshot file operation? Could that be taking a long time to complete?
  5. Unrelated to this issue but an additional major annoyance in the below code: in half my script I have to specify /config/www for things to work, and the other half I have to specify /local for it to work. Is that as designed?

Thank you in advance! Here’s a copy of my automation in case it helps.

  • id: ‘123’
    alias: Garage Status Description
    description: ‘’
    trigger:
    • platform: state
      entity_id:
      • cover.garage_door_1_msg100_main_channel
        from:
        to: closed
        for:
        hours: 0
        minutes: 0
        seconds: 15
        condition:
        action:
    • service: camera.snapshot
      metadata: {}
      data:
      filename: /config/www/garage-camera/garage-static.jpg
      target:
      device_id: 123456
    • delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 15
      milliseconds: 0
    • service: google_generative_ai_conversation.generate_content
      data:
      image_filename: /config/www/garage-camera/garage-static.jpg
      prompt: Describe what you see in this image from my garage camera. Your message
      needs to be short to fit in a phone notification. Include whether the garage
      door is open and the number of cars. Be friendly and polite.
      response_variable: geminitext
    • service: notify.mobile_app_hogphone
      metadata: {}
      data:
      data:
      image: /local/garage-camera/garage-static.jpg
      message: ‘{{ geminitext.text }}’
    • service: notify.mobile_app_iphone13_hb
      metadata: {}
      data:
      data:
      image: /local/garage-camera/garage-static.jpg
      message: ‘{{ geminitext.text }}’
      enabled: true
      mode: single
2

Did you ever solve this? I’m having the same issue.

3

No I didn’t, I’m sorry to say. :frowning:

4

Hmm I did run into a caching issue with my snapshots when I recently set up my first IP camera. To rule that out, can you try creating a new filename for every snapshot? Something like:

- service: input_text.set_value
  target:
    entity_id: input_text.xxx
  data:
    value: "{{ now().strftime('%Y%m%d-%H%M') }}"
- service: camera.snapshot
  data:
    filename: "/config/www/garage-camera/garage-static-{{ states('input_text.xxx') }}.jpg"
  target:
    device_id: 123456
...
- service: google_generative_ai_conversation.generate_content
  data:
    image_filename: "/config/www/garage-camera/garage-static-{{ states('input_text.xxx') }}.jpg"
...

If this works, you’d need a separate routine to clean up the outdated snapshots. But that can be the next task.