Field & platform basics, explained clearly

Protocols

FTP vs FTPS

Why encrypted upload matters, when plain FTP is only a fallback, and how the Untamed Data Platform uses per-camera logins.

Read guide → Setup

Setting up FTP on your camera

Where the settings come from, what to enter, and why it's usually done from the camera's app.

Read guide → Hardware

IP66 vs IP67 vs IP68

What weatherproof ratings mean for wildlife cameras left outdoors for months.

Read guide → Hardware

Protecting your trail camera

Security boxes, cable locks, and placement against theft, vandalism, and animal damage — plus the trade-offs.

Read guide → Platform

What is wildlife AI?

Detection, species labels, confidence scores, and the human review queue — without black-box cloud APIs.

Read guide → Upload

How camera upload works

One login per camera, brand-agnostic folders, then AI and the dashboard.

Read guide → Setup

What your camera needs

FTPS, internet, file types, and passive mode — the checklist before you buy or deploy.

Read guide → Quality

Review queue & confidence

Why some detections wait for a person, and how corrections stay in your data.

Read guide → Reporting

Natura 2000 monitoring

How camera-trap evidence — presence, relative abundance, and survey effort — feeds Habitats Directive reporting, and where the line is.

Read guide → Field setup

Placing a wildlife camera

Height, direction, distance, mounting, and the mistakes that ruin a season of captures.

Read guide → Field setup

Keeping a camera from sagging

Straps stretch and the camera tips down over weeks. Why it happens, how to mount so it holds, and when to use a firmer mount.

Read guide → Wildlife AI

Photos, video & how the AI reads them

How long analysis takes, and when photos or video give cleaner IDs, counts, and behavior data.

Read guide → Field setup

Battery & power in the field

Battery types, solar, cold-weather drain, and powering off-grid sites.

Read guide → Field setup

Preventing false triggers

Stop wind, sun, and vegetation from filling the card before the AI ever sees it.

Read guide → Upload

Manual vs automatic upload

When to let cameras upload on their own, and when to still walk the SD cards.

Read guide → Hardware

Night captures & IR: low-glow vs no-glow

White flash, low-glow, and no-glow IR — image quality vs staying invisible.

Read guide → Setup

GPS & camera location

Why location matters, and keeping camera coordinates consistent across seasons.

Read guide → Field knowledge

Moon phase & animal activity

How moonlight shifts nocturnal activity — and what that means for your data.

Read guide → Platform

Data ownership & export

You own the footage and the detections — and you can take them with you.

Read guide → Platform

Multiple cameras in one project

Structure a grid: projects, per-camera logins, shared maps and dashboards.

Read guide → Connectivity

Starlink & remote connectivity

Get footage out of no-signal sites — over any connection you can bring.

Read guide → Platform

Camera health & monitoring

Spot the camera that went quiet before you lose weeks of data.

Read guide → Hardware

Lens quality and the AI

Cheap cameras cut costs on the optics — and soft, low-detail images give the AI less to work with.

Read guide → Camera basics

How cameras trigger: PIR vs image

Passive-infrared heat versus pixel-based motion — the power trade-off, and what each one captures.

Read guide → AI & processing

AI on the camera vs the cloud

Why on-camera AI drains battery and data, and why we run the AI in the European cloud.

Read guide → Reporting

Relative abundance (RAI) & trap-nights

How the index is built from events and effort, the assumptions behind it, and where it's valid — same species over time, not a ranking across species.

Read guide → Privacy

Blurring people & vehicles

Wildlife cameras also catch people and vehicles. How the platform blurs them automatically and irreversibly — and where it can miss.

Read guide → Ownership

Avoiding camera lock-in

Many cameras tie your footage to one maker's app and cloud. How we stay open: camera-agnostic, your data, open standards, self-hostable.

Read guide → Standards

Camtrap DP

The open camera-trap data standard — deployments, media, and observations in one package that maps to Darwin Core and GBIF.

Read guide → Trust & provenance

Chain of custody & data provenance

What's tracked behind every detection — model, version, human review, survey gaps — and why it matters for audits and claims.

Read guide →