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- Field Notes #2
Sprites and CDNs
One of the hardest technical problems behind Aevocam wasn't storing decades of photos. It was making them play back smoothly like YouTube while still giving users the fine control of a security camera interface. Single frame stepping. Pinch to zoom. Hand scrubbing. And keeping it continuously up to date as new photos arrived. It wasn't a given.
I'll skip a lot of the early experiments and say that I settled on sprites and CDNs. If you've played old-school video games then you've seen sprites.…
- How to cut your costs
Aevocam offers very practical ways to keep your costs to a minimum. Not just in the early days, but also over the long term. To understand how to cut costs, you first must have a solid understanding of our baseline costs for service.
In a nutshell, your monthly fees are primarily based on how many megapixels of image content you store. Which means that your primary way to save money is to reduce how much image content you store. Over time, you want to keep the useful photos and discard the…
- How to configure my cameras
How to setup cameras for photo upload to the Aevocam platform
The photo ingestion process requires that each of your internet-connected cameras to upload photos to our servers. Currently, we only offer FTP uploading. But realistically, that's all most cameras will offer you, if they offer uploading at all. Many of them will only automatically upload video or snapshots to their own proprietary cloud servers.
You need to tell each camera how to connect to our FTP server. You will also need to set a schedule for uploading photos.
- How Aevocam works
A deep dive into Aevocam and why it can work for you
< Home
Use ordinary security cameras to upload snapshots one or more times per day. We store them for decades for cheap. We make them easy to review.
- Field Notes #3
Securing our CDN
In my last post I talked about how Aevocam delivers feed photos to your browser very quickly using an S3-backed CDN. You might have wondered if that is insecure, since CDNs are designed to make content easy to access and cache. How was I going to prevent someone from simply guessing photo URLs and downloading images they weren't supposed to see?
The traditional answer would be to have a web service that checks some authentication token from the browser to see if that user has permission to…
- Field Notes #1
31 years
This YouTube video caught my attention today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hpgEkAJsf0
- HA manual installer script
Redirects to a BASH script at
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JimCarnicelli/aevocam-homeassistant/main/manual_install/install.sh
- HA manual uninstaller script
Redirects to a BASH script at
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JimCarnicelli/aevocam-homeassistant/main/manual_install/uninstall.sh
- Getting started with Aevocam
Aevocam is a cloud platform for long‑term condition monitoring (LTCM). You connect Internet‑enabled cameras you already own, schedule them to send periodic still images, and Aevocam stores, organizes, and makes it fast to review months or years of visual history. It’s not a security DVR replacement; it’s for spotting and proving slow changes over time. See the overview on our home page and a deeper explanation in How Aevocam works.
One or more cameras that can capture still photos on a fixed…
- Some of agriculture's costliest problems develop slowly
USDA researchers asked farmers about the biggest resource concerns affecting their cropland. Nearly half identified soil-related problems, with water erosion ranking among the most common concerns. Read the story
The challenge is that erosion rarely announces itself. A drainage ditch deepens a little after each storm. A stream bank gradually retreats. A washout slowly widens until equipment can no longer cross safely. By the time the damage is obvious, weeks or months of change have already…
- Learn more about Aevocam
Aevocam creates a long-term photographic record of the things your business needs to keep an eye on. Point a fixed camera at a building, field, construction site, piece of infrastructure, equipment, or almost anything else that changes over time. Periodically send Aevocam a still photo, and we organize those photos into a visual history that can span months, years, or decades.
The result is a simple way to answer a surprisingly useful question: What changed here over time?
- Home Assistant - HACS
Installing the Aevocam plug-in via HACS
< Home Assistant
Aevocam can be installed in Home Assistant using HACS (Home Assistant Community Store). This guide is for users who already have HACS set up or specifically want to use it.
- Using Aevocam with Home Assistant
Home Assistant is an open-source smart home platform that lets you bring cameras, sensors, lights, and other devices into one place you control. If you already use Home Assistant for your cameras, Aevocam’s integration lets you take snapshots from those cameras and upload them straight to your Aevocam feeds—so you can keep using the cameras you’ve already set up without adding a separate capture path.
This article gives a short, focused walkthrough to get the Aevocam plug‑in installed and…
- Aevocam's billing plan explained
As a client you'll pay a flat monthly subscription fee. You pay at the end of each month for the prior month. You also accrue usage fees for photo ingestion (uploading) and ongoing storage. A portion of your subscription is regarded as an "allowance". If the sum of your photo ingestion and storage fees is below the allowance amount then you won't pay anything extra.
See the rates below. And explore realistic scenarios using our usage calculator. Below that are more of the gory details.
- Aevocam user & tenant management
Signing up, creating a tenant, inviting members, defining roles
Joining as a new Aevocam user is easy! Enter app.aevocom.com in the location field of your browser and enter your email address (remember to click the New User checkbox). Click on send authentication email button below your email address. You'll receive that email in a few seconds.
After you have been authenticated, you can either log in with the email address that you signed up with, or with your Google email address. For security reasons, you'll be sent an authentication email after every 24…
- Camera feed editor
How to customize the look, timing, and security of your feeds
Now that you've uploaded a number of photos to your Aevocam account, you can see what they look like in your feed editor.
Let's take a more in-depth look at the commands and controls.
- Supported cameras
Consumer and professional grade cameras that work with Aevocam
There are many security cameras and consumer webcams available. Not all of them are compatible. We rely on cameras to connect to our servers and proactively upload photos on the regular schedules you define. Currently, the only upload method we offer is FTP (see How to Configure My Cameras for details).
This also means that your camera must be connected to the Internet and able to access an FTP server on port 21.
- Long-term condition monitoring with Aevocam
An introduction to the vision and platform
Aevocam ("eye-voh-cam") provides cloud-based long-term condition monitoring (LTCM). You provide the internet-connected cameras. You set up schedules for your cameras to send us images. We provide storage, fast review, and analytics for your feeds. Think of each feed as a time-lapse video that could cover months, years, or even centuries.
Do you have fixed assets like buildings, yards, pipelines, roads? If you do then you need this.
- Home Assistant - Manual install
Installing the Aevocam plug-in manually
< Home Assistant
Aevocam can be installed manually on Home Assistant OS without HACS or a GitHub account. The installer downloads the current integration files and places them in Home Assistant's custom_components directory.
- Understanding your billing invoice
Click on the Invoices button (at the top of your tenant management page) to visit the Billing invoices page. Here you will see whether you have enrolled for automatic billing (through the Stripe platform), and see a list of invoices issued to date.
Click on the icon to the left of any invoice to see a detailed cost breakdown by subscription fee, ingestion costs, and storage costs.
- Field Notes #4
A practical use of AI
It seems AI is all anyone can talk about on LinkedIn these days. So many strong feelings and dramatic claims. Meanwhile many of us are using AI in very practical ways. One way you'll never see directly is in helping me manage Aevocam.com's public website.
I've never been a big fan of off the shelf content management systems (CMSes). I'm a programmer. I build my own and integrate it to whatever project it's part of. I usually keep it simple. In the case of Aevocam.com, all the pages are…
- Aevocam camera feed player
Exploring camera feed playback controls
Welcome to your Aevocam camera feed player! Enjoy intuitive and powerful ways and fine-grained control to review your camera feeds, including frame-by-frame review, image magnification, adjustable frame rates, and more.
In the top left corner of the player are 2 buttons. The leftmost command will take you back to the Feeds home page, while the Edit button will let you customize the look, details, and security of your feed.
- Solutions
How Aevocam provides solutions to business problems
< Home
Aevocam provides solutions to real problems across many industries. Wherever physical assets, property, infrastructure, or environments change over time, a long-term visual record can reveal what happened, when it happened, and how conditions developed.
- Aevocam vs CameraFTP
CameraFTP has provided FTP-based video and timelapse photo cloud storage and viewing. Their business model is oriented around predictable, relatively low cost storage service.
CameraFTP is a division of DriveHQ, a more generalized cloud storage service that has operated since 2003.
- Field Notes
Following are random thoughts from Jim Carnicelli about Aevocam.
8/23/2026 - I built a small AI agent to help me manage the Aevocam.com website.
- Contact us
The fastest way to reach out to us with any questions, suggestions, or comments you have about the Aevocam platform (including account, trial, or product feedback) is on the Aevocam Discord channel. Follow this link to join:
https://discord.gg/pHmf9buZ
- Frequently asked questions
What we are, what services we provide, and more
< Home
Aevocam (pronounced eye-voh-cam) is an intuitive and powerful cloud-based platform that uses timelapse photography to help you see and track change over weeks, months, and years.
- Show me the work before I show you the money
On a landlord forum, an out-of-state investor shared the story of their being billed to the tune of $10K in repair costs for an incomplete flooring job to their suite by a previous property manager (and, months later, for another $4K on the same repairs). Because the invoices were vague (i.e. "for rehab and repairs"), and lacked visual evidence of the work performed, the investor couldn't confirm whether the charges were justified, and was conflicted between paying or challenging the bill.
Vend…
- Renovation frustration: this unit was supposed to be ready tomorrow
"There is no way the condo will be ready for move-in by tomorrow ... I was told we would have a remodeled and finished apartment."
In replies to the above widely-shared Reddit thread, even property managers admit that they only know what contractors tell them. Contractors blame suppliers or other trades. No one can confirm actual on-site progress until it's too late.
- A hail Mary pass was needed to approve this insurance claim
If you live in a hailstorm-prone zone of the country, getting compensated for damages to your property should be straightforward. Unfortunately, in Calgary (the hailstorm capital of Canada), an insurer's failure to spot visible roof damage during the inspection of a homeowner’s property resulted in months of effort by the homeowner to change the insurer's narrative and have their claim approved.
While homeowners may want adjusters to accept their word, the reality is that proof beats…
- Absentee owners fear money being spent without oversight
In 2025, an Oxford, Mississippi-based property manager blogged about the lack of regulation and fears of absentee owners that maintenance approvals were happening with low to no oversight (especially when property managers used in-house labor or markups without documentation). Fear coupled with bad experiences have contributed to more than half of rental properties across the U.S. being self-managed.
Commercial asset managers also cited “lack of transparency into operations” as a core barrier…
- We can't see the forest for the trees: portfolio-level blind spots and pattern recognition
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In a UK portfolio case study, an owner with five properties had “long-standing maintenance issues” at many sites, but none were catastrophic on their own. Because each issue looked minor and local, they were never prioritized—until tenant churn, unpaid rent, and rising maintenance costs showed up portfolio-wide.
- Failure to seal walls leaves condo developer all wet
A few years ago, my parents downsized to a new Metro Vancouver condo tower that had a car wash station built into the fifth of its six-level parking garage. However, the property developer failed to take both the popularity of this feature and the rising water table into consideration. The constant usage of the car wash station over the first two years resulted in water dripping into the unsealed adjoining walls. That led to significant amounts of mold seepage and buildup in the sixth level…
- The case of the disappearing roofing contractor
A Canadian condo board hired a property manager to oversee a full roofing replacement. However, an investigation later revealed that old shingles were never removed; some roofs had three layers of shingles (which violated building code); rotten plywood was left in place; and ice-and-water shielding was missing or poorly installed. No inspection records, photos, or site documentation existed — only vague invoices. Worst of all, the contractor pulled a Houdini. No regular site visits were made,…
- An expensive snow job of a cleanup
At a condominium complex in Rockville, Maryland, property management hired a snow-removal contractor to clear the pathways after a winter storm. On paper, the job appeared to be “done.” Shortly afterwards, a tenant slipped on an icy patch outside and suffered severe injuries. During the litigation process, investigators discovered that: (1) the snow-removal contract lacked clear de-icing requirements, and (2) the property manager had no documentation or photos to show what conditions looked…
- Surprise fire inspection sends tempers flaring
A tenant in Ontario described a surprise fire department inspection that neither she nor the landlord were expecting. After the inspection, the landlord blamed the tenant and escalated harassment, while the tenant claimed that the unit had unresolved safety and standards issues. Both parties were fired up about the situation.
Without a shared, objective record of unit condition before inspection and no proof of when safety issues appeared (or how long they’d existed), the surprise inspection…