This page contains a number of screen shots illustrating the various features of ZoneMinder with brief explanations. For more comprehensive documentation see the various README files on the site or in the package. Also note that these screen shots are not updated with each new version and so may lag behind what you'll actually see in some respects.

This is the main ZoneMinder console. As you can see it lists the monitors and their states and also details various other information such as alarm counts. I've had to scale this a bit to get it to fit which has messed it up a bit, you can click on the image to view it full size. There are several things you can click on in this view.

Clicking on the 'montage' link takes you to this page which shows all active monitors and their current state. There's a mixture of camera types in this view, both pure video and network, colour and black and white.

This image shows a 'live' feed from one of the monitors. Under the live images are lists of some previous events for this monitor.

The monitor in the previous shot happened to be using a controllable Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) camera. So instead of the event listing you can instead display a panel to control the camera as in this image.

Going back to the console view, you might recal there we various counts of alarms generated over various periods. Clicking on these counts allows you to view the detals of the alarms in one of two formats.

The first format is the timeline view show here.

The alternative events view is a general list, optionally with thumbnails as show here. This is usually better for low bandwidth connectiosn whereas the timeline view works best for high bandwidth connections, e.g. when you are viewing from the same network as your ZoneMinder box.

Whenever you view the events in a list like this you will also see another small window pop up. This is the filter window which allows you to customise or select which events you see, or load previously saved filters and save filters to automatically delete, archive or email events etc.

Whichever event list view you choose (and you can always flip between them), you can review or get more detail about an event by clicking on it to bring up the window shown here. This event is about one third of the way through replay which you can tell by the progress bar just under the image. You can also click on this to navigate to certain locations in events.

This event has been caused by my cat wandering across the frame.

Replaying the event is good for getting an idea of what was going on. However it is often useful to be able to inspect certain frames more closely. Clicking on the 'Stills' link takes you to this view, where you can view the individual frames that make up an event. Frames that triggered the alarm, via motion detection, are highlighted by a red border.

If you click on one of the frames you get a closer look at what might have caused the event. In this case you can see that the area that my cat is in, and the area she has just left, are highlighted. This tells you what caused the event to be triggered. This highlighting is optional, but even if you have it switched on, clicking on the image will display an alternative with it removed.

As I mentioned in the previous image, there are various options you can use to control ZoneMinder. In fact there are lots! Here is a shot of the Options dialog which is accessible from the Console view. There are several tabs that group the options into categories. Clicking on the ? by an option will give you help.

One of the keys to using ZoneMinder successfully is the concept of zones. Zones are areas within an image that you can define for the purposes of motion detection, or even ignoring motion. Form the Console view you can click on the Zones column to get this summary view of the zones for a monitor. The zones are displayed on the image and also listed below. They are colour coded depending on their purpose.

Clicking on one of the zones in the image will bring up a configuration screen where you can define the shape and sensitivity of the zone in order to maximise detection or prevent false alarms for instance.

That's the end of the screenshots for now. I hope they've given you an idea of what ZoneMinder looks like and what it can do. There are, of course, many more pages and functions on top of those shown here.

If you want to find out more then I suggest downloading ZoneMinder and giving it a try. As well as source versions you can download CD distributions with it pre-installed or RPMs and other packages for various distros. Check the Downloads or more details.