u/Educational_Novel_50

I’ve been running a Reolink Argus 4 Pro on a Home Hub and wanted a simple way to capture still images on a schedule partly for a timelapse, partly to expose a latest image on the web.

I tried Reolink’s built-in timelapse first. It works fine if you only need the finished clip inside the Reolink app, but for my use case it fell short:

• The timelapse files on the hub don’t seem to be exposed in a way that’s easy to download or automate (I couldn’t find a practical API for pulling the image sequence or the generated video in bulk).
• I wanted the images on my own NAS, not only inside Reolink’s ecosystem.
• I also wanted a always-updated latest.jpg and a small status.json (battery etc.) that I could serve from S3 for a simple web view.
• Running it headless in Docker on a Synology NAS, on a fixed schedule.

So I put together a small open-source script that:

• takes snapshots on a fixed interval (clock-aligned)
• saves JPEGs locally
• optionally uploads latest.jpg and battery status.json to S3
• can build timelapse videos with ffmpeg
• runs in Docker (I use it on a Synology NAS)

It’s very much a “works for my setup” project. Sharing in case anyone else is looking for something similar. Not affiliated with Reolink. Just sharing in case it’s useful.

Repo: https://github.com/grenseland/reolink-image-snapshot