What do you use for this? Do you have to pay a monthly fee for the pictures to be sent to your phone?
I'm actually using a couple of them. One of them is a "Nest" camera (formerly known as a "DropCam"). I pay $100/ year for the cloud storage and I believe they store the history for 30 days. Someone on one of these forums told me that they now have an account where they'll store 14 days for $5/month. I haven't looked into that, but I should.
My Nest camera is actually an indoor camera. I have it sitting in a front window that looks up my 350' driveway. It will pick up a vehicle or a person coming up the driveway. You can also set "zones" in it, so it will give you a message of "sidewalk" or "driveway" based on where it senses the motion. This camera also has 2 way audio (like those doorbells), but I have the audio disabled since I really don't want hours of TV audio or me talking to Sweetie stored in the cloud. My only "complaint" with this is the night vision although it's not the camera's fault. We have our sidewalk post light basically in between the line of sight of the house and the driveway. When the light comes on, it totally messes up being able to see much past the light post, although I do have several night videos of various critters walking on the sidewalk. LOL! What's interesting is that I turned off the "infrared night vision" on the camera and that actually helped the night video in my situation. Nest has since come out with an outdoor version of the camera, but I haven't sprung for it.
Nest Cam Outdoor | Home Security Rain or Shine | Nest
My other camera is a D-Link DCS-936L. It's also an indoor camera, but I've had it mounted under the eave of my detached garage (obviously outdoors) for a couple of years now with no problem. They have newer versions of this camera now. It points towards my house and there is quite a bit of common viewing area between the cameras - although it's at different angles. It will also send me emails when it sees motion, but I don't pay any attention to them since the Nest sends me alerts that are easier to monitor. This camera doesn't save to the cloud, but it does store video on an SD card. The videos are 1 minute long each, so it is kind of a pain to find something, but I have used it. What I'll do is find the time that I want to look at based on the Nest camera (which has a "timeline interface") and then look for the timestamped DLink videos based on that. It also has sound recording and built in infrared. There are two little red lights on the camera when the infrared is activated. It gives pretty decent video quality for a low end camera.
Wi-Fi Cameras | D-Link
You might also want to look at Wyze Cameras. They are pretty inexpensive and people seem to like them. They also send text videos, save to the cloud (no fee, I think), etc. One of my buddies on another forum has one and really likes it. For the price, I'm considering one or two of them as well.
Wyze | Making Great Technology Accessible
The key to making these wi-fi cameras work is a good wi-fi signal. I have a Ubiquiti signal amplifier on my network. It's designed to be outdoors (which is/was my original plan) but mine is indoors - in my basement. This gives me a great signal most places on my property, including to the camera in the garage. Your average LinkSys home router may not give you the signal strength that you need for outdoor cameras. Even inside, my Nest camera used to drop the connection, but once I got the Ubiquiti installed, I haven't had a problem. There are plenty of IT guys on here that can give good advice on extending your wi-fi range.
I'll be curious to see what you come up with. I'm only on 5 acres here. I think you're on a lot more so you have additional challenges.
8 | eBay
