Configuration Reference

Every setting that matters, organized by what it controls. The desktop app shows these in a tabbed ⚙ Settings dialog; the server shows them on a Blazor /settings page. The names and defaults are the same on both editions unless noted.

Desktop app settings

Open with ⚙ Settings. The dialog has twelve tabs; click Save to apply or Cancel to discard.

Camera (RTSP)

Bird Identification

Monitoring

Advanced

Other tabs (summary)

• Email Notifications, Pushover, NTFY & Windows — see Notification channels.
• Summary Reports — Daily / Weekly / Monthly digest schedules, recipients, and delivery method.
• Photo Frame — FTP or email-to-frame delivery of snapshots.
• Community — see Community sharing.
• Video Summary — intro card, music, highlight extraction, Ken Burns, scheduled daily summary time.
• Debug Logging — per-component log levels (None / Low / Medium / High) for Bird Identification, Camera, Motion, Monitoring loop, and MainForm/UI, plus log-file rotation.

Server settings

On the server edition, settings live on the Blazor /settings page. They're grouped into the same logical sections as the desktop app, but presented in one long scrollable page with anchored sub-sections rather than tabs. All settings persist to data/config.json in your mounted data folder.

Major sections

• Camera — RTSP URL (or Pi camera device path), Camera type dropdown, Test camera button, ONVIF toggle.
• Detection — Confidence threshold, motion detection threshold, cooldown, daily cap, daylight hours.
• Location & weather — ZIP code or lat/long, temperature unit.
• Notifications — Email (SMTP), ntfy push.
• Community — sharing toggle, feeder name, and separate switches for uploading images and clips (the server has no Share Level dial; see below).
• License — paste a license key; deactivate to move to another machine.
• Storage — snapshot retention policy, video retention, ForReview folder toggle.
• Backups & Migrate — see Part 8 → Backups & migration.

Notification channels

Email (SMTP) — both editions

1. Enable email notifications.
2. Set the SMTP server and port (Gmail: smtp.gmail.com / 587), keep SSL / TLS on.
3. Enter your sending email + password and one or more recipients (comma-separated).
4. Click Send Test Email.

ntfy push — both editions

ntfy is a free, open-source push service that needs no account.

1. Install the ntfy app on your phone.
2. In settings, enable ntfy, keep the server https://ntfy.sh, and choose a unique topic name (e.g. birdwatch-myfeeder-12345).
3. Subscribe to the same topic in the phone app.
4. Click Send Test Notification.

Pushover — both editions

Pushover delivers instant push notifications (with the photo) to your phone, tablet, or desktop. Low-cost one-time purchase per platform after a free trial.

1. Create an account at pushover.net and install the app.
2. Create an application at pushover.net/apps/build.
3. In Settings → Pushover, enable it and paste your Application API Token and User Key.
4. Click 📱 Send Test Notification.

Windows desktop notifications — desktop only

Native Windows 10 / 11 toast pop-ups. Fast and local — no internet round-trip. Settings → NTFY & Windows tab.

Photo frame — desktop only

BirdWatchAI can push snapshots (and optionally videos) straight to a digital photo frame, turning it into a live bird gallery. In Settings → Photo Frame:

• Enable it, name the frame, choose whether to send snapshots, videos, and whether to auto-send on every detection.
• Pick a delivery method: FTP Upload (host, port, credentials, remote path, optional FTPS) or Email to Frame (the frame's email address + SMTP details).
• Click 🖼 Test Photo Frame.

You can also send any single detection on demand via the history right-click menu → 🖼 Send to Photo Frame.

Summary reports — both editions

Reports roll up your activity into a tidy digest with statistics, charts, and snapshots. Enable any of Daily / Weekly / Monthly with a chosen schedule, the recipient email(s), and the delivery method (Email, Pushover, or Both — on both editions). Reports are skipped automatically when there were no detections in the period.

Community sharing

Sharing is controlled in Settings → Community. It is off by default on both editions — nothing leaves your machine until you turn it on.

Server edition

Three checkboxes, on Settings → Community:

What a shared sighting always carries: the species, our confidence, the timestamp, the rarity, and the temperature when one was recorded.

Location. If you have set a ZIP code or coordinates — which you probably have, since the temperature lookup needs one — that location is attached to your feeder when sharing is on, and is used to place it on the public map. There is no separate level that withholds it. How precise it is depends on how you set it: a ZIP lookup gives an area-level position, while a street address gives coordinates close to the building. To share only an approximate area, set your location by ZIP code. To share none, clear the location before enabling sharing — and set Weather source to Don't record temperature, or the location will be needed again.

Desktop edition

The desktop app uses a single Share Level (0–4), which governs what leaves your machine:

On the desktop, and only on the desktop, location is shared at Level 2 and above, and GPS is used in place of ZIP only if you explicitly enable GPS coordinates.

Both editions

Other options on the tab:

• Enable Community Sharing — the master switch.
• Automatically push each detection — uncheck to share only manually (right-click a detection → 🌐 Push to Community…).
• When you correct or delete a detection locally, the change syncs to the community automatically.
• Your install periodically sends a heartbeat so the website can show your feeder as online / monitoring.

Communities — sharing with a group instead of the world

By default a feeder publishes to the Public Feed: everyone who visits the community site sees its sightings. A community is a named group you can publish into instead — a school sharing with its own teachers and parents, a nature centre, a birding club.

Your feeder can belong to any number of communities at once. The list lives in Settings → Community → Communities.

Joining

1. Public communities appear in the list — click Request to join.
2. For a private one, type its code into Join a private community by code and click Request to join. Private communities are deliberately not listed, so the code is the only way in.
3. The status shows Awaiting approval until a moderator of that community approves you, then Publishing.

Going private

Once a feeder has left every public community:

• Its sightings disappear from the public feed and map, and are visible only to members of its private communities.
• New photos and videos are stored in a private area with no public web address. Members' browsers fetch them through short-lived signed links; nobody else can open them at all.

Detection tuning — when defaults aren't right

The factory defaults work for most installs, but if you're getting too many false positives, missing real birds, or finding the AI keeps misidentifying things, here's what knob to turn:

On the desktop, the 📈 Telemetry window plots motion %, temperature, and your two thresholds against detection markers — the easiest way to pick a Motion Threshold that's just below real visits and above background sway.