Email Picture Preview

[fred7157]

Today 7/13/2020 I notice Arlo is no longer sending a picture in the alerts email. Anyone else experiencing that? I don’t see a pic on my iPhone or iPad.  

[TI994a]

Bringing up the app every time is an unacceptable solution for something that purports to be a security camera. The App is SOOOOO SLOW to bring up cameras. If I want to check to see who's at the door - the email plus preview picture is almost instantaneous. By the time the app pulls up and brings up a live feed from the camera - the person may be long gone.  Totally ridiculous to rip the critical email preview feature away with ZERO input from the community of users. 

[pohaku]

Removing email preview picture for the reason of "confusing and frustrating" is not a good solution. As you can see in this thread having a preview picture is an important feature and without it, the email notification is far less useful.

Perhaps, a better solution may be to have the "option" to include picture preview in email notification settings, including privacy and notification agreement if enabling it?

[arlo_user1233]

Can the Arlo moderators comment on if, and then when, this will be fixed?  You have dramatically decreased the utility of my nanny cam and house monitoring by removing the embedded picture from the emails.  I need to find an alternative setup if you will not be fixing.  Thank you

[TI994a]

pohaku -- genius solution! Too bad the Arlo team couldn't have figured that out. 

[CmraLvr2]

@arlo_user1233,  it'll be interesting to see if they reply.  Honestly the level of customer disregard in this decision leaves me doubting other aspects of customer commitment and service.  For instance, after they "solved" this thread, are they even still reading it or are they completely blowing us all off?  As I said, it will be interesting and educational to see if they reply at all, even if it is to tell us all to go away.

[jjy]

This decision is unacceptable given the quick need to see a picture of what is going on at any moment with the alerts. This was a bad decision as noted by all the negative responses to this change. Arlo needs to reverse this decision and give their customer base support for our needs. We bought your system and are subscribing to the cloud service for our security needs. It takes too long to use the link and bring up our library of videos, especially if we get many alerts. Reverse this!

[TI994a]

I think the Arlo team figures if they declare a thread "solved" then they go back to eliminating features for a living and ignore the thread.

[scpaquette]

Was told it is a security issue so they removed it. Arlo sux, wish I Went with another vendor

[scpaquette]

I had the same exact reply to my support ticket. It makes alerting useless.

[fred7157]

This is unacceptable! 

[scpaquette]

Funny, I saw your reply in my email. Isn't that a security concern 😂😅

[scpaquette]

So to make troubleshooting easier, remove all features, clowns 🤡🤡🤡

[fred7157]

All! We need to find and email the people below to voice our dissatisfaction with the decision Arlo made in regards to the email picture preview. I’ll be starting a Facebook group to distribute. 

Matthew McRae - CEO 

Gordon Mattingly - CFO

Naveen Chhangani - Vice President of Product and Services

Lily Knowles - SVP of Sales, Marketing and Customer Care

Tejas Shah - SVP of Product 

[scpaquette]

So my case was just updated telling me how to add my email..... SMH 😥

However, you may try this troubleshooting steps below:
1. Tap or click mode > base station name.
2. Tap or click the ARMED pencil/arrow icon beside for a mode.
3. Tap or click the pencil icon under the rules section of the camera.
4. Under the alert section, clear the check box next to email alerts. This turns off email notifications.
5. Tap or click save to apply the changes.
6. Logout and login back.
7. Go back to the mode and enable the email alerts again for the two cameras.
8. Power cycle the base station, unplug and re-plug it from the power outlet.
9. Test the email alerts, if there is still no snapshot review.

[eswenson]

This didn't work for me.  I tried these steps and caused motion in one of my cameras (the one for which I toggled off and then back on (with the intervening logout and login)) and there is still no picture in the emails. 

This brings up another issue with Arlo's recent implementation of MFA.  Logging out and back in, of course, requires MFA.  However, it sometimes takes quite a bit of time for the SMS notification to come, so logging in is painful.  This is another reason why the pictures in the emails are critical -- it is no longer "easy" to login to the web app.  And for some reason, you can't allow the browser to be "recognized/remembered" such that you don't need MFA from it.  This is another annoyance.  Seems Arlo rolled out two features without really thinking about the implications, or following other successful roll-outs of MFA by other companies. 

[TheDougToo]

Sad that Arlo removed this, it was a great feature so you know if you had any actions to take when there are false positives. Bring it back, listen to your community. 

[scpaquette]

Going to drop Arlo, had cameras for a few years now, invested hundreds of dollars and was never happy. Buying this product was a mistake ~ lesson learned

[scpaquette]

its not going to work,  they removed it for "Security" reasons and apparently it was confusing customers.  Also they noted it makes troubleshooting easier if its not in the product.

[scpaquette]

Matthew McRae @mbmcrae  

[GR2011]

I'm sure it makes troubleshooting easier. Lol. In their minds, it's one less feature/problem to have to deal with. Hope to remove my Arlo stuff this weekend if I manage to decide on an alternate system.

[nizmoz44]

In the standard Arlo group here and on reddit tons of people are complaining on this issues including myself which I’ve had your cameras for maybe 4 years. The original Arlo pro. And now you got rid of the number one feature I used to scan my Arlo alerts and I can’t anymore so I have to turn off Arlo notifications. Sadly this absolutely wastes my time now to open the app to look at the notifications for the day. And I won’t be alerted immediately anymore on something that maybe important because I’m not willing to open the app every time. You’ve lost a long term customer due to this.

[eswenson]

Is Arlo really not going to respond to this thread now? Isn’t it totally obvious that you have unhappy customers here? If I don’t get a response from Arlo soon, I’m replacing my cameras. This is not how you keep customers happy!

[eswenson]

Thanks for that. I just tweeted repliles to his Twitter feed -- where he announced the Arlo Pro 3 cameras.  I'm simply astounded that Arlo isn't taking this seriously and talking to us here in this thread.  Looking for other cameras now (recommendations, anyone?)

[scpaquette]

that's the problem with Arlo,  they just don't care.......

[fred7157]

Earlier this week Arlo removed the picture preview from the email it sends when motion or sound is detected on a camera. This feature was invaluable and saved lots of time. Without the picture preview we have to login to the app or the website to view the image\video which is very inefficient. Arlo says they did this on purpose with no valid reason given. We also need to post reviews on Amazon for the Arlo cameras to reflect the feature being taken away. I'm sure many agree with me as this was a bad decision. 

Please reach out to the CEO of Arlo on Twitter and let him know how much we miss this feature. 

The CEO of Arlo is Matthew McRae, his twitter handle is @mbmcrae 

Also reach out to CNET, PCMAG and Tech Crunch (tag them in the Twitter post)