Standard Attachments

Notifications may contain an image, video, or audio file attachment that is displayed alongside the notification. See table for supported media for a breakdown of support by platform.

Downloading

An attachment is an image, video, or audio file which is downloaded to the device when a notification is received and shown alongside the notification. A thumbnail is shown when the notification is not expanded. The full size attachment is shown when the notification is expanded.

There are several locations to which you can save and you can use the camera.snapshot action to save snapshots.

note

Attachments are required to be accessible from the internet, but not necessarily without authentication. See sources below.

media_source (recommended)

The media_source integration has the advantage that access requires authentication headers (which Home Assistant provides to the companion app). This means the content is not publicly available.

You can use relative URLs in the format /media/local/direct.jpg with this integration.

info

A file stored in /media/file.jpg on-disk is represented by /media/local/file.jpg in the notification. Note the addition of the local part of the path.

www folder

You will want to store the image in the www folder located in your Home Assistant config directory. This will then expose the image to the internet so that you may use it in your notifications and receive them anywhere.

You can use URLs in the format /local/file.jpg with this integration.

info

A file stored in /www/file.jpg on-disk is represented by /local/file.jpg in the notification. Note the change of the local part of the path.

Automatic snapshots

Android users can also use /api/camera_proxy/camera.name where camera.name is replaced by the entity ID of the camera you wish to use.

iOS users can use the camera stream in dynamic attachments.

tip

To expand a notification on 3D Touch devices simply force touch any notification. On non-3D Touch devices swipe and tap the "View" button.

Image entities

Images from image entities can use /api/image_proxy/image.name where image.name is replaced by the entity ID of the image entity you wish to use.

Supported media types

Please ensure your attachment meets the criteria below, otherwise it will not show.

Attachment Type	Maximum file size	Allowed Formats	Supported Platform
Image	10 MB	JPEG, GIF, PNG	Android &
Video	50 MB	MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI	Android &
Audio	5 MB	AIFF, WAV, MP3, MPEG4 Audio

version 2021.5 or later will attempt to re-download larger files when opening the content if they exceeded the size.

Parameters

You can use the following keys to add attachments. See supported media types above. All of the URLs provided must be accessible via the internet.

Key	Example values
video	/media/local/video.mp4 https://example.com/video.mp4
image	/media/local/photo.jpg https://example.com/image.jpg
audio	/media/local/audio.mp3 https://example.com/audio.mp3

When present, values will be used in the order of the table above. For example, you can specify an audio and image and iOS will pick up the audio while Android will pick up the image.

  Notes:

• If you are setting the icon_url and image property then only the image will be displayed on the device.
• If you are setting the image and video property then only the video will be displayed on the device.
• Video will be shown as a series of frames captured from the video file. It will not work well with videos that are < 10s long.
• GIF will only be animated in notification shade on Android 14+

Example action

automation:
  - alias: Notify Mobile app attachment
    trigger:
      ...
    action:
      - action: notify.mobile_app_<your_device_id_here>
        data:
          message: "Something happened at home!"
          data:
            # an example of an absolute url
            image: "https://www.home-assistant.io/images/default-social.png"
            # example of a relative url
            image: "/media/local/image.png"
            # the same works for video
            video: "/media/local/video.mp4"
            # and for audio
            audio: "/media/local/audio.mp3"

Example of visuals

An unexpanded push notification with an image attachment:

The same notification but expanded to show the full size image attachment:

Configuration

Specific

See table for supported media

You can customize the attachment on the notifications using the following format:

- action: notify.mobile_app_<your_device_id_here>
 data:
   message: "Something happened at home!"
   data:
     attachment:
       # hide the thumbnail, only show when long-pressing/3d-touching notification
       hide-thumbnail: true

• url (Optional): The URL of content to use as the attachment. This URL must be accessible from the Internet, or the receiving device must be on the same network as the hosted content. This overrides any image, video or audio values.
• content-type (Optional): By default, the extension of the URL will be checked to determine the filetype if a url is provided, or inferred from the use of the image, video and audio keys. If there is no extension/it can't be determined you can manually provide a file extension.
• hide-thumbnail (Optional): If set to true the thumbnail will not show on the notification. The content will only be viewable by expanding.
• lazy (Optional): Requires v2021.5 or later. If set to true the attachment will not be downloaded immediately and will only be loaded when viewing the notification. Use this to avoid downloading obviously-too-large attachments, but if they are only occasionally too large, you shouldn't provide this key as the app can attempt both.

Android Specific

See table for supported media

• GIF filetype will only be animated in notification shade on Android 14+