Stay safe while on vacation with Angelcam
Pre-vacation blues got you down? You know the feeling. Your plans are all set, tickets are all booked, and sunscreen is all secured, but what about that sinking feeling you have about your home? How can you ensure its safety while you’re away and rest easier knowing that while your vacation will eventually come to an end, that your home will be just as you left it when you return?Believe it or not, it’s much easier than you think and to show you we’ve put together five savvy tips on how you can better secure your home while you’re gone.
#1: Share your camera feeds with family, friends, or trusted neighbors
Angelcam offers the ability to share your camera’s livestream or cloud recording capabilities with other Angelcam accounts. By doing so, you can rest easier knowing you have a second, third, or even more pairs of eyes on your property or belongings. This is especially useful if you plan to be without internet access at any point while you’re away.
Any camera connected to Angelcam can easily be shared with another Angelcam user account. Simply select the camera, click the Manage Guests button, and input the email address of another user account. If the person you wish to share it with doesn’t have an Angelcam account, by entering and submitting their email address in the same fashion they’ll ultimately by invited to create a free Angelcam account. Either way, once they’ve accepted your invitation they’ll then have instant access to your camera feed and recorded footage including via our mobile app, which is available for both Android and iOS devices.
#2: Optimize your camera positioning
Camera positioning is crucial for successful identification and verification. This is not only to avoid difficult lighting situations, but also to ensure that persons or objects are captured at an effective angle. For instance, a bird’s-eye view from a camera placed too high above the ground will cause some degree of distortion, making it difficult to identify people or objects.
- Consider what you’re trying to capture when choosing a camera location, whether that be a person’s face, a license plate, general traffic, or whatever’s relevant to your needs.
- Vulnerable areas of your property should be a top priority when deciding where to mount a camera. Obscured entrances or windows often provide cover for potential break-in attempts. Ideally, make sure your camera is installed at an eye-level height. The higher it is, the worse it will be for identification purposes. Angles greater than 25 degrees limits the ability to capture important forensic facial evidence. With that, if you do choose eye-level positioning, make sure your camera is anti-vandal rated, ideally IK10. High-traffic areas, where someone can travel through without much suspicion, are another good location for a camera. This includes the front door of your home, where people are most often to not be seen as a threat or suspicious.
#3: Record your footage to the cloud
Storing your video footage to the cloud provides ease and accessibility, giving you instant access to your camera feeds and recordings, and with that, the ability to act in a rapid fashion should the need arise.
Angelcam offers a solution to access your stored footage from any place that has internet access. Whether from your mobile device or an internet browser, you’ll have instant access to your live camera stream and recorded footage. While storing footage locally to a camera’s SD card, DVR, or NVR solution can be easier to set up, it’s often hard to integrate those options with a viable means of accessing and/or viewing the footage remotely.
Being able to access your footage whenever you want, from wherever you are, is a great benefit when maintaining home security while you’re away. Furthermore, sharing your camera feeds with friends or family gives them the same opportunity to quickly check and confirm if and when an emergency occurs.
#4: Make routine camera checks
Part of protecting your property is to regularly make sure your cameras are up and running properly.
It’s important to make routine checks of your camera feeds to ensure there are no anomalies, blockages, or other issues detrimental to keeping your view optimized. Spiderwebs and dirty, defocused, or cracked lenses are among the most common problems. Also, you’ll be able to quickly react to any cameras being offline or at a suboptimal angle.
Checking in on the daily happenings of your property will make it easier to determine if something is wrong or out of place and that regular routine will likely improve your ability to quickly identify any abnormalities.
How Angelcam can help you?
- We can send you an e-mail if any of your cameras are offline for more than 20 minutes. Here you can find out more.
- We are testing a service where a real people, an operator from Central Monitoring Station, are checking a video from your camera in defined timeslots (at least once a month, typically during a night) whether a video is clear, not blurred, not covered by a spider net. If you are not our customer, sign-in to our newsletter to be informed when we will launch the service for all of our customers.
#5: Connect a sensor that detects motion
With Angelcam, finding important events within your footage is made so much easier with the implementation of motion-triggered event marking. Angelcam’s new interface makes it not only easy to connect IFTTT– and email– (SMTP) compatible sensors, but to directly link triggered events from those sensors to your recorded timelines allowing you to see exactly when a certain activity occurred.
Each event will show up as a vertical line on your timeline, making scrubbing through footage more effective and less time-consuming.
Rest easier, stay safer with Angelcam.