frigate/docs/docs/configuration/review.md

id	title
review	Review

import ConfigTabs from "@site/src/components/ConfigTabs"; import TabItem from "@theme/TabItem"; import NavPath from "@site/src/components/NavPath";

The Review page of the Frigate UI is for quickly reviewing historical footage of interest from your cameras. Review items are indicated on a vertical timeline and displayed as a grid of previews - bandwidth-optimized, low frame rate, low resolution videos. Hovering over or swiping a preview plays the video and marks it as reviewed. If more in-depth analysis is required, the preview can be clicked/tapped and the full frame rate, full resolution recording is displayed.

Review items are filterable by date, object type, and camera.

Review items vs. tracked objects (formerly "events")

In Frigate 0.13 and earlier versions, the UI presented "events". An event was synonymous with a tracked or detected object. In Frigate 0.14 and later, a review item is a time period where any number of tracked objects were active.

For example, consider a situation where two people walked past your house. One was walking a dog. At the same time, a car drove by on the street behind them.

In this scenario, Frigate 0.13 and earlier would show 4 "events" in the UI - one for each person, another for the dog, and yet another for the car. You would have had 4 separate videos to watch even though they would have all overlapped.

In 0.14 and later, all of that is bundled into a single review item which starts and ends to capture all of that activity. Reviews for a single camera cannot overlap. Once you have watched that time period on that camera, it is marked as reviewed.

Alerts and Detections

Not every segment of video captured by Frigate may be of the same level of interest to you. Video of people who enter your property may be a different priority than those walking by on the sidewalk. For this reason, Frigate categorizes review items as alerts and detections. By default, all person and car objects are considered alerts. You can refine categorization of your review items by configuring required zones for them.

:::note

Alerts and detections categorize the tracked objects in review items, but Frigate must first detect those objects with your configured object detector (Coral, OpenVINO, etc). By default, the object tracker only detects person. Setting labels for alerts and detections does not automatically enable detection of new objects. To detect more than person, you should add more labels via or and select your camera. Alternatively, add the following to your config:

objects:
  track:
    - person
    - car
    - ...

See the objects documentation for the list of objects that Frigate's default model tracks. :::

Restricting alerts to specific labels

By default a review item will only be marked as an alert if a person or car is detected. Configure the alert labels to include any object or audio label.

Navigate to or and select your camera.

Expand Alerts config and configure which labels and zones should generate alerts.

# can be overridden at the camera level
review:
  alerts:
    labels:
      - car
      - cat
      - dog
      - person
      - speech

Restricting detections to specific labels

By default all detections that do not qualify as an alert qualify as a detection. However, detections can further be filtered to only include certain labels or certain zones.

Navigate to or and select your camera.

Expand Detections config and configure which labels should qualify as detections.

# can be overridden at the camera level
review:
  detections:
    labels:
      - bark
      - dog

Excluding a camera from alerts or detections

To exclude a specific camera from alerts or detections, provide an empty list to the alerts or detections labels field at the camera level.

For example, to exclude objects on the camera gatecamera from any detections:

1. Navigate to and select the gatecamera camera.
   • Expand Detections config and turn off all of the object label switches.

cameras:
  gatecamera:
    review:
      detections:
        labels: []

Restricting review items to specific zones

By default a review item will be created if any review -> alerts -> labels and review -> detections -> labels are detected anywhere in the camera frame. You will likely want to configure review items to only be created when the object enters an area of interest, see the zone docs for more information

:::info

Because zones don't apply to audio, audio labels will always be marked as a detection by default.

:::

Reviewing Motion

The Review page also can show periods of motion that didn't produce a tracked object, and provides a way to search past recordings for motion in a specific region. These tools complement the alerts and detections workflow above — see Tuning Motion Detection for how the underlying motion detector is configured.

Motion Previews

The Motion Previews pane shows preview clips for periods of significant motion that did not produce a tracked object. It is useful for spotting things that motion detection picked up but object detection did not, which can help validate tuning or catch missed objects.

On the page, click the kebab menu on a camera and choose Motion Previews. Each card represents a continuous range of motion-only activity and plays back the recorded preview for that range. A heatmap overlay dims areas of the frame with no motion so the moving regions stand out.

The pane provides a few controls:

• Speed — speeds up or slows down all of the preview clips at once.
• Dim — controls how strongly non-motion areas are darkened by the heatmap overlay. Higher values increase motion area visibility.
• Filter — opens a 16×16 grid overlaid on a snapshot of the camera. Select one or more cells to only show clips with motion in those regions. This is helpful for filtering out motion in areas like a busy street while keeping motion in your driveway.

Clicking a preview clip seeks the recording player to that timestamp so you can review the full footage.

Motion Search

Motion Search lets you scan recorded footage for changes inside a region of interest you draw on the camera. Unlike Motion Previews, which surfaces what Frigate's motion detector flagged in real time, Motion Search re-analyzes the saved recordings, so it can find changes that were missed (for example, an object that appeared while motion detection was paused by lightning_threshold, or in a region that is normally motion-masked).

To start a search, open the Actions menu in History or click the kebab menu on a camera in the page and choose Motion Search. In the dialog:

1. Pick the camera and time range to scan. In the date pickers, days that have recordings available are underlined.
2. Draw a polygon on the camera frame to define the region of interest.
3. Adjust the search parameters if needed:

Field	Description
Sensitivity Threshold	Per-pixel luminance change required to count as motion inside the ROI. Behaves like Frigate's motion detection threshold setting.
Minimum Change Area	Minimum size of a single moving region, as a percentage of the ROI, for a frame to count as significant. Raise it to ignore small movements (leaves, distant motion); lower it when your subject covers only a small slice of the ROI. Every result shows the percentage it scored, so you can use those values to tune this.
Maximum Results	Maximum number of matching timestamps to return. The search stops once it reaches this many results, so a lower value finishes sooner while a higher value scans further into the range.
Parallel mode	Decode multiple recording ranges at the same time. Speeds up large time ranges at the cost of higher decoding and CPU usage.

Motion Search samples each recording's keyframes automatically, so there is no frame-rate or sampling setting to tune.

Once running, Frigate scans the recording segments that overlap the time range and reports timestamps where changes were detected inside the polygon, along with the percentage of the ROI that changed. Clicking a result seeks the player to that moment so you can review what happened.

The results panel shows the time range being scanned, a live progress bar with the timestamp currently being analyzed, and the running result count. A collapsible Search Metrics section reports how many segments were scanned and processed, how many were skipped because no motion was recorded in the ROI (using the stored motion heatmap), how many frames were decoded, and the total search time. Skipping segments with no recorded motion in the selected ROI is what makes searching long time ranges practical.

Common use cases

Frigate's main use case is to record and surface tracked objects, so Motion Search is most useful for the cases where object detection produced nothing — there is no object to find in Explore, but you suspect something happened.

• Locating an unattributed change. You know something appeared, disappeared, or moved in a window of footage — a package now gone, a gate left open — but no detection points to it. A search returns the candidate timestamps instead of scrubbing the timeline by hand.
• An object that was never detected. Something Frigate doesn't have a model label for, an object too small or distant to be detected, or movement in a region where detection isn't running. The activity left no tracked object but did change the pixels, so a search can still find it.
• Activity while detection was effectively paused. Changes that occurred while object detection was disabled, motion was suppressed by skip_motion_threshold, or inside an area covered by a motion mask, won't appear as review items or tracked objects but can be recovered by searching the recordings directly.

Examples

These show how to choose the ROI and Minimum Change Area for two common goals. Minimum Change Area is the size of a single moving region as a percentage of the ROI you draw, so the right value depends on how much of the ROI your subject — and its movement between samples — covers.

Because samples are a second or more apart, a moving subject usually appears in two places at once in the comparison, so even ordinary motion often scores tens of percent and a low threshold lets in almost everything. The most reliable approach is to run a search, look at the percentage each result scored, and set Minimum Change Area just below the values for the events you care about. The default is 20%; the suggestions below are starting points.

• When did this item first appear (or disappear)? A package was dropped off, a car parked, or a trash can was moved, and you want the exact moment. Draw a tight ROI around the spot the item occupies and raise Minimum Change Area (start around 40–60%). Because the item fills most of a tight ROI, its arrival or removal is a large change, while smaller nearby motion (shadows, a passing pedestrian) stays below the threshold. The earliest result is when it appeared; if you only care about that moment, a low Maximum Results finishes faster. If you get no hits, the ROI is probably looser than the item — lower the threshold or tighten the ROI.
• What's been getting into the garden? Something has been trampling a flower bed overnight and no object was ever tracked. Draw a looser ROI covering the whole bed and use a lower Minimum Change Area than the case above — start near the 20% default and lower it (toward 5–10%) only if a small or distant subject is missed, since it covers just a slice of a large region. Expect more results to scan through — step through the timestamps and jump to each to see what triggered it. If wind-blown plants add noise, raise Minimum Change Area or the Sensitivity Threshold.

Expected performance

Motion Search analyzes the saved recordings on demand rather than reading a pre-built index, so a search over a long range takes longer than browsing Motion Previews. Cost scales mainly with how much footage has to be examined: segments with no recorded motion in your ROI are skipped using the stored motion heatmap (shown as "segments skipped" in the status panel), so a quiet range finishes quickly while a busy one takes longer.

To increase the speed of searches:

• Draw a tight ROI. Because Minimum Change Area is measured as a percentage of the region you draw, a tight ROI around where you expect the change makes the object fill a larger share of the area, so it clears the threshold more easily. A loose ROI makes the same object a small fraction of the region, so it can fall below the threshold and be missed — forcing you to lower Minimum Change Area, which lets in more noise.
• Narrow the time range to the window you care about, so there is less footage to examine.
• Lower Maximum Results when you only need the first few hits. Because the search stops once it reaches that many results, a smaller value lets a busy range finish early instead of scanning the whole window.
• Use Parallel mode to shorten wall-clock time on multi-core systems, at the cost of higher decoding and CPU usage while it runs.