Is there any way to have the Nest Doorbell camera ONLY turn on when the doorbell is rung?

[easyanae]

Per the title - I only want the camera to turn on when the doorbell is rung. It's a bit uncomfortable for my neighbours to constantly feel surveilled otherwise. Is this possible?

[MplsCustomer]

@easyanae 

We've had Google Nest Hello Doorbells since 2019. I don't think there is any option to turn on a Google Nest doorbell's camera only when the doorbell button is pressed.  The battery doorbell's camera, however, only wakes up and records when an event occurs.

[easyanae]

Thanks! I guess then the question becomes 'how can I make only rings register as an event', so that the camera doesn't wake up whenever anyone just walks past?

[MplsCustomer]

@easyanae 

Well, with wired doorbells (non-battery) the camera is always "Live", but under Settings | Events | Seen events, you could turn off both notifications and recording for all events.

With the 1st gen Google Nest Hello Doorbell, if, under Settings | Notifications "Push notifications" is turned on, you'll only get notifications and recording when the doorbell button is pushed. I don't know if the same thing is true of your 2nd gen Google Nest Doorbell (wired) because the description of "Push notifications" in the app is different.

[easyanae]

Thanks again. I actually do have a 1st gen wired - it just didn't give me the option to select that when posting, so I just selected 2nd gen wired.

Could you clarify a little on the 'seen events' options? I can't find that in either the Nest app or the Google Home app.

[MplsCustomer]

@easyanae 

I was referring to the options in the Google Home app because your post said you had a 2nd gen doorbell.

With the 1st gen Google Nest Hello Doorbell (we have 3), all you can do in the Google Nest app is turn off notifications for various events under Settings | Notifications, but the events will still be recorded if you have a Nest Aware or Nest Aware Plus subscription.  Without a subscription, you'll only get still photos for events in the most recent 3 hours.

If you happen to have a 1st gen Nest Aware subscription, what gets recorded and saved for how long varies:

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9681538