frigate/docs/docs/configuration/snapshots.md

id	title
snapshots	Snapshots

Frigate can save a snapshot image to /media/frigate/clips for each object that is detected named as <camera>-<id>.jpg. They are also accessible via the api

Snapshots are accessible in the UI in the Explore pane. This allows for quick submission to the Frigate+ service.

To only save snapshots for objects that enter a specific zone, see the zone docs

Snapshots sent via MQTT are configured in the config file under cameras -> your_camera -> mqtt

Frame Selection

Frigate does not save every frame — it picks a single "best" frame for each tracked object and uses it for both the snapshot and clean copy. As the object is tracked across frames, Frigate continuously evaluates whether the current frame is better than the previous best. A frame is considered better if:

• It has a face attribute (for person objects) or license_plate attribute (for car/motorcycle objects) with a larger bounding box area than the current best. Once the current best frame has one of these attributes, it can only be replaced by a frame with an even larger one — score and area improvements alone won't override it.
• The object's detection score is more than 5% higher
• The object's detected area is more than 10% larger

All scores and areas above refer to the parent object (e.g. person, car), not the attribute. Frames where the object's bounding box touches the edge of the frame are deprioritized. Image quality (e.g. blurriness) is not considered during frame selection — the blur_confidence_filter setting only affects face recognition confidence, not snapshot selection. The snapshot is written to disk once at the end of the event using whichever frame was determined to be the "best".

MQTT snapshots are published more frequently — each time a better thumbnail frame is found during tracking, or when the current best image is older than best_image_timeout (default: 60s). These use their own annotation settings configured under cameras -> your_camera -> mqtt.

Clean Copy

Frigate can produce up to two snapshot files per event, each used in different places:

Version	File	Annotations	Used by
Regular snapshot	<camera>-<id>.jpg	Respects your timestamp, bounding_box, crop, and height settings	API (/api/events/<id>/snapshot.jpg), MQTT (<camera>/<label>/snapshot), Explore pane in the UI
Clean copy	<camera>-<id>-clean.webp	Always unannotated — no bounding box, no timestamp, no crop, full resolution	API (/api/events/<id>/snapshot-clean.webp), Frigate+ submissions, "Download Clean Snapshot" in the UI

The clean copy is only saved when clean_copy is enabled (the default). MQTT snapshots are configured separately under cameras -> your_camera -> mqtt and are unrelated to the clean copy.

:::note Clean copies were previously saved as .png. Frigate now saves them as .webp for smaller file sizes, but the API will still load legacy .png clean copies for older events. :::

The clean copy is required for submitting events to Frigate+ — if you plan to use Frigate+, keep clean_copy enabled regardless of your other snapshot settings.

If you are not using Frigate+ and timestamp, bounding_box, and crop are all disabled, the regular snapshot is already effectively clean, so clean_copy provides no benefit and only uses additional disk space. You can safely set clean_copy: False in this case.