Reducing False Alerts and Too Many Notifications

Detection zone setup screen in LightCam app

Getting pinged every time a car drives by or a tree branch moves? That gets old fast — and when everything's an alert, nothing is. Here's how to tune your camera so you only hear about what matters.

Step 1: Adjust detection sensitivity

Go to Settings → [Camera Name] → Detection Sensitivity and lower it one notch.

Person detection is tuned to human shapes. Lowering sensitivity reduces alerts for small movements — blowing leaves, passing shadows, insects — without meaningfully affecting detection of actual people walking up to your door.

Start with one notch down and give it a day. You can always adjust further.

Step 2: Set a detection zone

This is the single most effective fix for most people.

Go to Settings → [Camera Name] → Detection Zone. Draw a box around the area you actually care about — your front door, your porch steps, your driveway. Events outside that zone won't trigger an alert.

If your camera points at a busy street, a moving tree, or your neighbor's driveway, excluding those areas makes a dramatic difference.

Step 3: Look at what's triggering the alerts

Open a few of the clips from the false alerts and see what's actually there. Common culprits:

Tree branches or bushes moving in wind — lower sensitivity or shrink the detection zone to exclude them
Cars passing on the street — set the detection zone to exclude the road
Insects at night — attracted to the camera's IR light. Try pointing the camera slightly downward. Also clean the lens — a smudge makes IR bloom much worse at night.
Neighbors' outdoor lights turning on — sensitivity adjustment usually handles this
Shadows from passing headlights — detection zone adjustment, exclude the part of the frame where shadows sweep

Step 4: Silence the phone without turning off detection

If you want clips saved but fewer phone buzzes, you can turn off push notifications for LightCam in your phone's Settings → Notifications → LightCam — without touching anything in the app.

Detection keeps running and clips keep saving. Your phone just doesn't ping you. Good option if you'd rather check the app when you want to rather than getting interrupted.

A note on outdoor cameras

Some movement is expected outdoors. The goal here is tuning, not eliminating every alert. A camera that never alerts has usually been tuned too far down and may miss the things that actually matter.

If detection stops triggering entirely, that's a different problem — see the "Security Clips Missing or Not Recording" article.