Camera and Deployment management

Manage the cameras that belong to your Project

Creating / deleting / updating Deployments

A "Camera" in Animl is a representation of a physical camera trap that may be moved around and Deployed to different locations over the course of its working life. Cameras are identified by their Serial Numbers. A "Deployment" in Animl is how we represent a specific Camera deployed at a specific location for a specific length of time (and provide a more human-readable name for the Deployment).

To create, edit, or update a Deployment within your Project, click on the “Manage Camera” button on the sidebar on the left (the camera icon), find the camera in the camera list, open the camera drop-down menu to the right (three dots icon), and select “Add Deployment” from the menu. Fill out the Add Deployment form and select a Start Date.

NOTE: the End Dates for Deployments are determined automatically. For example, if Deployment B starts after Deployment A, the End Date for Deployment A is the Start Date for Deployment B. If Deployment A is the most recent, an End Date will not be set as it’s considered a current and on-going Deployment.

Once the Deployment is created it will appear below the Camera in the list, and you can edit it (by clicking the "pencil" button to the right) or delete it at any time (by clicking the "x" button). Deleting a Deployment or changing its Start Date will not remove any of the images that previously belonged to it; instead, Animl will re-assign all images that were taken by the Camera based on the Start/End Dates of the new set of Deployment configurations.

Registering a wireless camera

To integrate a new wireless camera, you first need to pair, or "register" it with your Project. To do so, click on the “Manage Camera” button on the sidebar on the left (the camera icon), and on the bottom of the popup, type in the serial number of the camera, select the camera Make, and click “Register Camera”. If a camera trap camera is already registered to different project, the registration attempt will fail and display an error.

NOTE: it's not necessary to register non-wireless, traditional, SD-card-based cameras (the images from which would be uploaded via the Bulk Upload feature).

Releasing a Camera

To release a Camera from which you no longer wish to receive images from (for example, if you were transferring a camera to a different Project), click on the “Manage Camera” button on the sidebar on the left (the camera icon), find the camera in the camera list, open the camera drop-down menu to the right (three dots icon), and select “Release camera” from the menu.

Editing a Camera's Serial Number

You can edit the Serial Number for non-wireless cameras at any time. To do so, from the Manage Camera popup, find the camera you'd like to modify, open the camera drop-down menu to the right (three dots icon), and select “Edit camera serial number” from the menu. You can then modify the Serial Number in the text box and click "Update".

Merging two Cameras together

If you'd like to combine the images from one Camera into another (for example, if you misspelled the Serial Number Override while uploading a batch of images that you wanted to be associated with an existing Camera in your Project), follow the steps above to open the edit serial number form for the camera you want to merge from (the "source" camera), and then input the Serial Number of the camera you want to merge into (the "target" camera) in the text box. When you click "Update", all of the images from both cameras will be combined and associated with the target Camera's Serial Number.