Webcam XP 5.6 - how to clear email queue of photos, and how to log in remotely

#1

This is the first time I’ve run into this… I have one of my webcam XP setups running on a small “netbook” in a Tree house in my back yard. (Don’t ask… I was looking to see who was up there without permission, and it turned out to be cats> :slight_smile: Anyway, Doing this brought up some problems I’d never realized in all the years and versions I’ve had. First, for whatever reason, no matter how many times I’ve “saved settings”, the option box to send security captures by email doesn’t persist through restarts. I think that’s an old bug, but that’s not my problem… apparently the program has been running for over a week saving up images, so when I recently fixed its settings the floodgates opened, and I got tons of email. So I went back and checked the default location where it was storing its captures. Nothing there! So just to be on the safe side, I changed the capture location to an area within “My Documents” (rather than Application data). Well… I figured there would still be some residual emails, but when I got back to my computer where I receive my emails, I’m still seeing dozens of emails coming in, each with another dozen photos, and its very obvious these photos are still days behind.

So question #1: How can I definitively FLUSH the email queue.

Question #2, if this can be done remotely, I’d like to know. But I’ve never set up a password or admin credentials on this machine, and no “defualt” login I can think of seems to work. I’ve tried no entry, "admina + admin, admin + 1234. Nothing works. But maybe I can’t clear the image cache that way even if I did log in?

Thanks for any guidance.

#2

Hi,
Q1: question is where the emails were stuck? Did you receive duplicates? If nothing on the machine it was sent. Flushing no.
Q2: If you want to control webcam through the web client you setup access under the tab access restriction. In the web client you are asked to login.
-Henrik

#3

They may be duplicates… its hard to tell with the names being so long, But I can’t find any duplicates. Is there anything in the names of the files that would tell the time the photo was taken? What does a name like cam_1_20050113_031708_125.jpg" mean? They keep coming. Note that if the “2005” means the year, then these photos are definitely weeks old, because that was from before I set up the machine’s bios and windows date/time.

So I AM sure they must be being stored on the machine somewhere other than where I pointed the capture configuration. I’ve even changed the angle the camera is pointing, and despite the live feed confirming the view, all the photos are still the old view. So they must be buffering up somewhere.

On Q2, I guess you’re saying that you have to set the access restriction. Since I have no password set up yet, it lets me view the live feed without logging in. But… you say you HAVE to set up a password to get to the “admin” page? And you say that even if I do, there is no way to “flush” the email queue?

#4

Hi,
Very mysterious I must say.
cam_1_20050113_031708_125.jpg
20050113 is January 13 in 2005. Webcam did not exist then, but :smile:
31708 is the time 03h 17m 08s
You say that if 2005 is the year the files must be weeks ago. For mne 2005 was for 13 years ago. Why 2005 and no the correct time and date?
The files must be on the computer so just search for them. When you found one the rest is probably there also.

No password lets you only view the video in the web client. Setting up password and enable administrator lets you do more. Necessary to flush an email queue I have never heard of. Normally, you set up how long time files should be saved and the automatically deleted.

Why have the computer on 2005? Set it up to the actual date. It might be a conflict somewhere that causes all this.

-Henrik

#5

HA!!! So the story is, back to the tree house, I saw evidence that someone (or something) was “visiting”> Since the tree is in range of the house Wi-Fi, I grabbed this old “Netbook” computer that hadn’t been used in ages, installed my Webcam-XP on it, and took an old logitec camera and set it up in the treehouse. It didn’t occur to me till I first saw the email dates from the pictures, that the computer time had defaulted to its out-of-box state. So that was over a week ago. I then adjusted the computer’s time/date, re-configured the location for captures, and then let it continue running. So now the email time-stamps were correct and up to date. BUT… the names of the images all still reflected 2005! So that right there told me that there was a huge cache of images saved up somewhere, no doubt because I had the sensitivity up way too high. But its days later and images with names starting “cam_1_2005” are still coming in, and a windows search for “cam_1_2005” in a file name comes up dry!

I may have to use the control panel to completely remove the program, erase all its directories, and re-install from scratch. Very weird though! Where are the images being stored? In the “twilight zone”? LOL!

#6

You never know what is going on in a tree house. I definitely agree on the twilight zone :smile: search for 2005. Also in the control panel make hidden files and folders visible if that helps.
I would definitely go for a clean installation.
Looking forward to next episode :slight_smile:

#7

if the forum allowed images, I’d post a couple of cats captured at night up there. :smile: But in the mean time, this “treehouse” surveillance was the original reason I was waiting for confirmation on whether I could use these IP cameras. Even though its a well sheltered treehouse, outside is a lousy environment for a PC. I’m sure you’d agree would be much better to set up wireless cameras outside, run the Webcam-XP on my inside machine, and just let it store photos on the local machine. But even at this good price, I can imagine it would near impossible to get any info from an ali express seller if I had trouble getting it to work. If I take a chance and buy one of these, could yo rank my chances of being able to configure it and discover it with my old software version?

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hd-Bullet-1080p-Ip-Camera-2mp-Wifi-Wireless-Outdoor-Waterproof-Infrared-Night-Vision-Motion-Detect-Cctv/32679004479.html

#8

For the camera it says it support the standard onvif so it should be “easy to connect” to Netcam Studio. Using webcam xp would be problematic since it do not support that much IP cameras and not ONVIF. It focus on USB.

#9

That seems to be the opposite of what you said last time we discussed IP cameras with Webcam XP, when you first showed me this list: http://www.webcamxp.com/ipcams.aspx .

All I know is, IP cameras should not be this hard to work with. There are hundreds of companies selling security systems, with cameras that work with THEIR system, or THEIR phone apps. It shouldn’t be this hard. One of the reasons I finally went for the registered “pro” version of Webcam XP was the hope that someday I could expand to outside surveillance, using IP cameras. But I don’t think I’ve found a single one of the cameras on that linked list on ebay or anywhere, and I’m pretty sure that one I linked on ali-express was one that another XP user was testing.

I guess its just not going to happen?

#10

Hey Henric, I hate to keep beating a dead horse with this thread, but back to the original question. Recall i was getting unending mis-dated pictures of motion capture (the treehouse camera), even after setting the image capture location to a directory in the windows “My Documents” area. The misdating was caused by my CMOS battery (and thus the system clock) being reset. Well since then I’ve fixed the battery and bios time, and moved that lap-op along with my camera to a ledge under the sofit area of my house roof. there it can do better surveillance of a wider area. It was also easy to run power to it there. Its an old MSI netbook i don’t need anyway, so it can stay there. I also completely uninstalling the program from the control panel, reinstalling from scratch, this time immediately setting the image and video storage areas) and I once again set up everything else and started the security motion detector to send me emails. I did all that to finally get rid of all the mystery backed up images.

Well I was shocked to find that this new installation once again began endlessly sending the same mis-dated pictures, each one showing views from the old camera location! Last time I mentioned this, you’d suggested the complete uninstall, and told me there was no place within the program to simply flush its saved up cache of existing images. Well it seems now that anything short of re-formatting the HD will not get rid of this backlog. Ifr its any help, I know that both the control panel uninstall and manually deleting the whole directory in program files certainly did not reqally remove everything, because all my email configuration and camera setup was still all there after re-installing and re-starting. So maybe some registry entries need to be searched, I don’t know. But could you please ask the coders where I should look on my hard drive where the program would have stored all these pictures, before I manually changed the save location? Since a windows search for these JPG files or part of the file names couldn’t find any, they must be being stored in some other way, in some kind of image cache file. Someone who coded this product must know where I could go to simply delete this directory, to the program can really start fresh. I know you normally only support the latest version, but I didn’t see anything like my problem in any later version release notes, so I think upgrading before resolving this would be just inviting more headaches.

Thanks for any help.

#11

Hi there,
Certainly strange. My first test is to open a new mail account on gmail or something and connect to webcam and see what happens.
-Henrik

#12

I’ve done that already and it doesn’t change anything. Plus I can see, looking at the email page on the security tab, the way about 2 dozen JPG files at a time are assembled, shipped out (via email in my case) and deleted. Obviously at one time the sensitivity settings were accidentally set way to high, the wi-fi was out of range, and so it just buffered them all up. I’m pretty sure what is happening is that despite the file names, which seem to indicate the cam source, date, and time, and of course the JPG extender, Webcam is likely NOT storing these files that way. Its probably either saving them is come kind of cache file, or saving them with names that just reflect the timestamp in something like standard UUT time format or something. So searching for anything reasonably like the final file names is turning up nothing.

You’re here all the time, so is there any way you could ask the design team exactly how the images are stored, or where to look?

#13

Have you really removed what in these folders? ProgramData is a hidden folder so you must make it visible first.
A search for files in a hidden folder do not give any result.
image

#14

Hmmm… Well I had moved the capture setup to a location in “My Documents”. But I forgot where they used to be. Recall I orignally bought Webcam XP thinking it the best choice for my Window XP machines. I’ve never seen a “ProgramData” folder in XP, and this one doesn’t have it either. Did you mean “Application Data”? If so, I’ll have to check again. There are multiple “Application Dat” folders kept in XP systems in C:/Documents and Settings/USER/Application data. That “USER” portion has a different instance for each user, and quite often there are several (Administrator, All Users, All Users.WINDOWS, Default User, Default User.WINDOWS, Local Service, etc… at least a dozen more! I guess I can look through them all,. I don’t see any reason I cant take the whole “Documents and Settings” tree and many it un-hidden. I’ll let you know the result.

Bu the way, the steady flow of email pictures ins now up to March 29. So maybe even if I don’t find where they were, the system will eventually catch up to the present day, and finally start using the locations I specified. Crossing fingers!

Thanks for all the help and patience!

#15

Eureka! Webcam XP maintains a folder called Email.Queue. On my laptop it was in

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users.WINDOWS\Application Data\webcamXP 5\Email.Queue

Note that this has nothing to do with where you configure your folder for “Captured Images and Movies”! That location is only temporary! If you configure Webcam to send the images via email, they ultimately end up in Email.Queue! So if anyone else asks about this, now we both know where the logjam is!

It took the poor old laptop several minutes just to open and display the folder contents, and another minute or so to delete them all. 84000 images were in there! Now the program is gathering images as it should… from Today’s date! :slight_smile:

I’ve since created a shortcut on the desktop so I can get to it more easily in the future, and I’m thinking of putting a little TCP/IP based program on the machine, so I can more quickly delete, or even retrieve images.

#16

Congrats, finally problem solved!! Yes, I will certainly remember this. In the same time I hope no one will have this problem, but if … :slight_smile:
Thanks for sharing, good luck and sorry for not being the expert on this :wink:
-Henrik