Feed creation and configuration

For many use cases, you’ll want to publish images produced by your camera to a wider audience, be that company internal for monitoring purposes, or as marketing on your website.

Feeds were created for just this purpose. Feeds are designed to provide public access to a controllable subset of the images inside a single image table, without compromising the security of your entire dataset. They also provide a range of branding options on top of that.

This page deals with creating and configuring feeds in the yellow portal, not with how to publish them on your website. There is a separate page dealing just with that: https://avisec.atlassian.net/l/c/1WH0vJCv

General feed settings

Feeds have general settings like branding and contact options that are configured per camera rather than per feed individually. Read about these settings here: https://avisec.atlassian.net/wiki/x/CoAnuw

Creating and configuring feeds

All feeds are created the same way. There are slight differences in configuration depending on what type of feed you choose, those will be noted below in “Types of feeds”. This paragraph will explain aspects that are common to all feeds.

The feed overview page

To see a list of all the feeds you have access to, go to the left-hand menu in the portal, click feeds, then image feeds:

On this page you can edit existing feeds by right-clicking on them, or create new ones by clicking the “create feed” button in the top right corner of the screen.

The page for creating or editing a feed looks like this:

As mentioned, depending on chosen feed type, you may see additional parameters, or entire configuration sections, allowing to configure specific aspects of specific feeds. The parameters shown here will always be present though, and will be important for all of them.

Token: Each feed receives a randomly generated token that allows accessing the feed through feed.yellow.camera/<token>. The token is not configurable and will be generated once you save the feed. The token is guaranteed to be unique, and is guaranteed to always stay the same for a feed. In other words, you will not be able to change it.
Token alias: While the token is the most unambiguous identifier for a feed, it often doesn’t look pretty in a url. Also, you might decide to create another feed at some point to replace the current one, and still want to refer to it by the same name. For these reasons, you may specify an alias that will allow access to the feed as well, so you can link to your feed through feed.yellow.camera/MountLookitthat, instead of something less descriptive like feed.yellow.camera/YAUFTNCR
Accessibility: There’s three accessibility levels: Web-Open, Public, and Private. Web-Open means that you are giving avisec implicit permission to publish your feed, and allows search engine bots to index it. Public means the feed is accessible to anybody that knows the token or alias, and may not be re-published or indexed. Private means the feed is not accessible at all. Use it if there’s an issue and you need to take a feed offline temporarily, as deleting a feed may lead to issues because its replacement will be assigned another token.
Latest image is public: If you check this box, the latest image in the feed can be downloaded directly through api.yellow.camera/feed/<token>/latest.jpg. Sometimes this is useful, because it allows you to present the image your own way if needed. Sometimes this is undesirable, because it might not be in your interest for 3rd parties to be able to access the image without your branding that comes with the feed.
Name: A name for the feed for identification. It will be displayed in the feed list in the portal. It will not be visible in the feed itself.
Title: A title for the feed. The title will be displayed in the feed itself when configured in the cameras general branding options, and can be combined with a link.
Camera: The feed must reference a certain camera.
Table: The feed must point to a specific image table of the referenced camera. This is where all images visible in the feed will be taken from. Note that the camera and table cannot be altered once the feed is created.
Type: The type of feed you want to create. See next chapter. The type can only be selected once a camera has been chosen.
Description: Enter a text description that will be displayed in the feeds info popup. The text may contain links in the form of HTML <a> tags, but no other HTML elements are supported.
Error page URL: You may enter a link to a page that should be loaded if the feed currently has an error for whatever reason.
Show error page right now: Check this box to force the feed to display the error page instead. This can be helpful for hiding a feed on short notice should the need arise.

Types of feeds

There are different types of feeds, each with somewhat different configuration options and functionality. Currently, the following types of feeds are available.

Image feed

The image feed is the simplest and most straightforward way to publish your camera. It comes with all the default branding options, and always shows the latest image of the table it is pointing to:

Delayed feed

A delayed feed is identical to the Image feed, except you can configure a delay. The image the feed shows will not be the latest in the table, but always be at least as old as the configured delay.

History feed

The history feed publishes the ten latest images of your feed, for the times when you want to give people a bigger picture:

Archive feed

The archive feed is very similar to the history feed, but allows you to publish all images going back a configurable amount of days. It is recommended that you don’t configure a number of days larger than you consider absolutely necessary for your purposes. Publishing a long chronological selection of images makes it rather easy to accidentally violate GDPR-compliance.

Browsable feed

The browsable feed is an archive feed that splits its contents into individual days and provides navigation by date. Just as the archive feed, it allows configuring the timeframe available in which images can be viewed, but can more conveniently present larger timeframes.

This feed must be used very carefully! It will potentially make a very large amount of chronological images publically accessible. Unless the images in the table are properly processed, it is almost certain that this will violate GDPR in some form or other. If you think about using this feed, please consider the following:

You may better and more securely achieve what you intend by giving select persons a guest account for a specific camera table in the portal instead (you can easily do this using the invite feature in the cameras browse page).
If you just want to show progress over a longer time, a timelapse feed will demonstrate it more effectively.
You should never create a browsable feed on a table with original, high-resolution images.
Consider using the anonymiser to remove moving objects and persons from the images, as well as identity masks or overlays to hide areas in the image that may violate GDPR, like roads, surrounding buildings, etc.
While a feed token is an identifier, not a security measure, it does provide some obscurity. You should never publically share a browsable feed's token and only make it known to persons that need to know and won’t publish it further. Do not publish a browsable feed or its token on a website, and do not give it an easy to guess alias!

Timelapse feed

A timelapse feed is a bit more than just publishing images from your cameras. It is coupled to a fully automated video rendering toolchain in our backend, making it very easy for you to publish timelapse videos of your progress without publishing all individual images in that time period. The timelapse feed does not currently offer any branding.

The timelapse feed offers 3 parameters to control what it will show:

Delay in days: Configure an amount of days the timelapses should lag behind the current state. Similar to the delay in the delayed feed, except it cannot be so granular, since timelapses are only rendered once each day.
Days: The amount of days backwards in time the timelapse should cover.
Length: The length the rendered video should have, in seconds. This can range from 10 seconds to 5 minutes. Note that the video is rendered at a fixed framerate. If there are not enough images in the day span you configured, it may be that the video ends up shorter than this. If there are more images in the configured range than can be fit in the videos length, the timelapse will still show the entire progress during those days, but will drop images at regular intervals to make the video fit the configured length.

Panning image feed

A panning image feed is an animated feed that will render your image using the full available height of the viewport and will pan from one end of the image to the other and back. Optionally it can also do an endless pan in the same direction for images that wrap around.

Panning speed: How many seconds the pan should take to move from one end of the image to the other.
Continuous pan: If checked, the feed will pan endlessly in one direction. This is intended to be used with 360 degree images that wrap around

Panning feed vs. Panofeed

The panning feed seems similar to the Panofeed (read more on it below), but is really not the same thing. A Panofeed provides a full, dynamic view of images potentially more than 100 megapixel in size. It can be panned manually and is zoomable, and can display hotspots in the image. A panning feed offers none of those features. It is intended for a preview-style publication of a much smaller image with a similar aspect ratio. With a properly sized image, a panning feed will load much faster than a Panofeed and is therefore more suited to publication in galeries or similar. On the other hand, a panning feed with a full-sized pano image will be a disaster that slows your website to a crawl, as it does not support any dynamic loading whatsoever.

Panofeed

The panofeed was especially developed for the avisec panocam, to present arbitrarily large images fluently zoomable and panable in a web browser. Beyond that it has its own branding options, a 30 day archive, and the ability to place visual markers on top of the presented image to highlight points of interest. Despite being develped with 360 degree images in mind, it can be used to publish images that do not cover 360 degrees, and that originate from any camera. Do note however that unless you have a panocam, the panofeed is not included in the standard price and will incur additional costs.

For details on how to configure a panofeed, please refer to its own page.