A picture from your uploads or a URL, with optional auto-refresh.
On this page
Shows a picture — either one you have uploaded to your account, or one fetched from a URL. It can re-fetch on a schedule, which turns it into a poor man's camera feed.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Source | Upload an image, or point at a URL |
| URL | The image address, when using a URL source |
| Refresh interval (seconds) | How often to re-fetch the image |
| Fill type | How the image fits the card |
| Title | The card's heading |
| Show title | Show or hide the title |
Fill type
How the picture fits the space:
| Fill type | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Cover | Fills the card, cropping the overflow |
| Contain | Fits entirely inside, leaving empty space |
| Fill | Stretches to fit, distorting the image |
Cover is right for photos and wallpapers. Contain is right for diagrams, floor plans and anything with text, where cropping would lose information. Fill is rarely what you want.
Refresh interval
Leave it empty for a static image.
Set it and the card re-fetches on that schedule. This is how you show a camera snapshot URL, a weather radar image or a generated graph.
The minimum is 10 seconds. That floor exists to protect both your Homey and whatever server is hosting the image — a card refreshing every second is a surprising amount of traffic, especially with several such cards on a wall panel running all day.
Image or Video?
- Image with a refresh interval — a still that updates. Cheap, works everywhere, a few seconds behind.
- Video — a genuine live stream, including RTSP. Smoother, but heavier.
For a doorbell camera you glance at, a refreshing Image card is often the better choice: it uses far less battery and bandwidth than a continuous stream.
Tips
- Floor plans. Upload a plan of your house and use Contain — an attractive backdrop for a room-navigation dashboard.
- Cache-busting. Some servers return the same cached picture every time. If a refreshing card never changes, the server is caching; appending a changing query parameter sometimes helps.
- Check the URL is an image. It must point at the picture itself, not at a page containing the picture.