I probably should note that I installed the NEST camera probably around Oct or Nov 2018. I wrote stuff up about it but never published anything here because – well – the website was not working…

I had mentioned about Nest Aware – Seems I was on a free 30 day (or 90 day?) trial of Nest Aware that came with the camera. With Nest Aware, you set up “zones” in the camera field of view – and if the camera detects motion in selected zones you get an alert message on your phone. Plus, you get some history to go back and look at. But, when the free trial expired, all that stuff went away. I could still access the camera on the “public” link, as well as the live view on my phone and through the Nest website. And video history was limited to a few hours on the phone and website.

But, Nest Aware is a subscription service with how much history you want to keep determining how much you pay per month. I wasn’t crazy about that.

The Nest camera has a pretty wide field of view and where I installed it gave me a good view of the (detached) garage, the gate to the yard and part of the driveway but I found that some people would pull in just off the road and just out of the field of view so I started looking at adding another camera.

After a bunch of research I found two that I liked – the Amcrest ProHD and the Reolink. Similar features on both but the Reolink could use a SD card so went with that. More on that in the next post.