Cameras

Camera tiles show snapshot previews on your watch grid. Tap one to open a full-screen live stream — live streaming is a Pro feature (Camera Live Streaming); on the free tier, tapping a camera refreshes its snapshot instead.

Streaming Modes

Wrist Assistant streams live video by default and adapts to your connection automatically. You can change the mode in Settings → Camera:

• Live — Smooth real-time video, recommended for most setups. The watch streams adaptively (adjusting quality and frame rate to your connection) and automatically falls back to snapshots if a camera can’t stream. The default.
• Snapshots — Fetches periodic stills at the refresh rate instead of streaming. The most compatible option, working with any camera — switch to this only if live video has trouble on your network.

Refresh on Page Open

Camera tiles can refresh themselves the moment a page becomes visible, so a snapshot is current the instant you swipe to it. Configure the default in Settings → Camera Settings → Refresh:

• Refresh on Page Open — Master toggle (on by default).
• Debounce — Skip the refresh if the current snapshot is newer than this (5s / 10s / 30s / 60s, default 10s), so quick back-and-forth swipes don’t hammer the camera.
• Delay — Wait a moment before refreshing, and cancel if you swipe away first (Off / 250ms / 500ms / 1s, default Off). Useful when paging through a camera page on the way somewhere else.

Each camera tile can override the global setting in the editor’s Camera tab with a Default / On / Off picker.

Snapshot Loading

When a page has several camera tiles, their snapshot previews load in parallel so the page fills in quickly. Settings → Camera Settings → Snapshot Loading → Load At Once caps how many snapshots Home Assistant grabs at the same time:

• Unlimited (the default) — grab every camera’s snapshot at once. Fastest, and fine for most setups.
• 1, 2, 3, 4 (and higher) — throttle the parallel grabs so your camera source isn’t hammered all at once.

This is a server-side setting

Load At Once is a property of your camera source / NVR, not of an individual watch. It’s stored in Home Assistant and shared across all your devices — change it on one and it applies everywhere. It also affects only still snapshot previews, never the live video stream (that’s the Streaming Modes setting above).

Keep it on Unlimited unless your NVR drops frames or returns errors (HTTP 503s) when many snapshots are requested together. If that happens, lower it to 1–4 to ease the load. This control requires an up-to-date Wrist Assistant integration — if it doesn’t appear, update the integration in Home Assistant.

Loading Dots

Settings → Camera Settings → Refresh → Loading Dots (on by default) shows a row of per-camera progress dots at the top of the page while two or more cameras are loading, so you can see the page filling in. Turn it off for a cleaner look; the pull-to-refresh spinner is unaffected either way.

Features

• Digital Crown zoom — Rotate the Digital Crown to zoom in (up to 10×); drag to pan when zoomed
• Viewport crop & pan — Configure a default crop and pan position per camera tile from the iPhone editor’s Camera tab, so your tile always shows the most important part of the frame — useful for wide-angle cameras. (Complications have their own separate viewport crop, set in the complication’s settings.)
• Swipe between cameras — In full-screen, swipe the bottom edge to jump to the next camera. Enable Loop Cameras in Settings to wrap back to the first.
• Tap to close, double-tap for HD — In full-screen, a single tap dismisses the view; a double tap toggles HD on cameras that have an HD stream (an HD badge shows while it’s on).
• Multi-cam tiles — Group several cameras on a single tile for a security overview. Each camera’s preview loads progressively, and tapping opens the cameras individually in full screen. Configure in the editor.
• Adaptive resolution — Snapshots are requested at the actual tile pixel size, so smaller tiles get smaller images (saving bandwidth, especially over Bluetooth relay) and larger tiles stay sharp automatically.
• Snapshot caching — The app caches snapshots so camera tiles load instantly when you open the app, even before a live connection is established.
• Configurable refresh rate — Separate rates for standard view (0.5s–5s) and HD full-screen. 2–3 seconds is a good balance of responsiveness and battery.
• HD streaming — Full-resolution streams in the full-screen view (Premium feature).

Notification Snapshots

Camera notifications can carry a snapshot image, and you can frame each camera independently for those notifications in Settings → Notifications → Camera Snapshot Framing. This crop is stored separately from the tile/complication viewport crop above — a wide-angle camera can show the whole scene on your grid but a tight crop in alerts.

• Per-camera crop editor — Drag a crop rectangle over each camera’s preview. The framing is keyed to the entity and applied by Home Assistant when it captures that camera, so it’s shared across your devices.
• Framing list — Thumbnails for every camera, with a green dot on the ones you’ve framed. Reset to Full Frame (or long-press) clears a camera’s crop.
• Refresh Snapshots — Re-fetch the thumbnails when a camera’s scene has changed.
• Test Snapshot Delivery — A connectivity probe that confirms snapshots can be delivered and reports a home/away verdict.
• Send Test — Fire a real notification for that camera so you can check the framing on your iPhone (lock the phone right after to see it on the watch instead).
• Preview quality — Toggle between Clear (HD) and Fluent (SD) for the captured image.
• Tap Action — Choose which stream entity opens when you tap the snapshot (auto-detected from Home Assistant, or override it).

On the watch, tapping a notification’s snapshot opens that camera’s full-screen live stream (a Pro feature — Live Streaming). On iPhone, expanding the notification auto-streams the camera live, with tap-to-refresh as the fallback when it can’t stream — see Notifications for the full behavior.

The saved crop applies to the live stream too, not just the still — Home Assistant crops the stream server-side, so the live view on both iPhone and watch stays framed to the region you chose.

Tile Sizing

Camera tiles work best at 2x1 or larger. A 1x1 tile is too small to see much. Go 2x2 or bigger if you want a proper preview without tapping.

Tips

• Cameras work best on Wi-Fi. Streaming over iPhone relay is slower.
• If a camera shows black or won’t load, check that it works in Home Assistant directly first.
• Lower the refresh rate if your watch feels warm — cameras use the most resources of any tile type.
• For a security dashboard, use a dedicated page with multi-cam tiles covering all your cameras.

Setup

Add a camera entity in the editor, resize the tile, and you’re done — snapshots work on every tier; opening the full-screen live stream is a Pro feature (Camera Live Streaming). Camera settings — stream settings, refresh rates, refresh on page open, swipe sensitivity, and Loop Cameras — are under Settings → Camera Settings.