Home Assistant integration
Most cameras can email and nothing else, which is no use to an automation. NVR Bridge takes that email and turns it into something Home Assistant can act on. There are two ways in: publish to the Mosquitto add-on over MQTT, or fire a webhook automation trigger. Either way the snapshot arrives as a URL you can drop straight into a notification or a picture card.
{
"camera": "back-gate-cam",
"at": "2026-08-12T21:04:11Z",
"trigger": "gate / person",
"detections": [
{ "label": "person", "score": 0.94 }
],
"snapshot_url": "https://…/snap.jpg",
"gif_url": "https://…/clip.gif"
}How it works
Each camera gets its own private inbound address. Point the camera's existing email or FTP alert settings at it — no firmware changes and nothing to install.
Running the Mosquitto add-on? Add an MQTT notification pointing at it — over an SSH tunnel if Home Assistant isn't exposed. Prefer automations? Create a webhook trigger, copy its URL, and add a webhook notification that posts to it.
A trigger describes what matters — motion on the back gate, a person on the driveway, one particular number plate. Attach the Home Assistant notification to it and only those events go out. One trigger can feed several destinations at once.
Hit Test to push a sample event with sample detections, so you can see exactly how it lands in Home Assistant before a real one arrives. Every delivery after that is logged with its result.
What you get
Questions
Not for the MQTT route. We connect out to an SSH host on your network and publish to the broker over the tunnel. The webhook route does need a reachable URL — Nabu Casa or your own reverse proxy.
Yes. The payload carries a direct link to the snapshot, which both the mobile app's image attribute and a picture card will render without any further work.
No. The camera connects outward to us using the email or FTP settings it already has. There's no recorder, no mini-PC, no VPN and no inbound port to open.
Yes. Turn on detection and filter the trigger to what you care about — a person, a vehicle, a particular animal, any number plate or one specific plate. Everything else still lands on your timeline; it just doesn't interrupt you.
Add a camera, point its email at the address we give you, and watch the first event land. About five minutes, all of it in a browser.
Related
Home Assistant, by camera brand