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Users & access

Not everyone who logs into Crumb should see everything. A house-sitter might need the front and back cameras for a week; a family member might get live view but not the ability to export footage; only you might touch settings. Crumb's Users & Security section (in the admin console) lets you draw those lines.

There are two pieces: what a person can do (their role) and which cameras they can see (their access).

What a person can do: roles​

A role is a named bundle of permissions you can hand to one person or many. You create a role once (for example "Family" or "Guard"), decide what it's allowed to do, then assign it to users. When you change the role later, everyone with it updates at once.

The permissions a role can grant include:

  • Playback: review recorded footage, not just the live view.
  • Clips: open the Clips feed of detections and motion.
  • Export: build and download export archives.
  • PTZ: pan, tilt, and zoom cameras that support it.
  • Manage views: create and edit saved camera layouts.
  • View license plates: see recognised plate reads and search the plate database, scoped to the role's cameras. This one is sensitive, a plate database is privacy-sensitive, so leave it off unless a role genuinely needs it.
  • Bookmarks: how much bookmark access a person gets. Four levels: None; Own (create and see only their own); View all (see everyone's, but create and edit only their own); and All (view and manage everyone's).

Leave a permission off and that person simply doesn't see that capability. Someone with live view but no Export, for instance, can watch cameras but can't pull footage off the system.

Which cameras they can see: access​

Access is set in two layers. The role carries a base set of cameras that everyone assigned to it can see. On top of that, an individual user can be granted extra cameras beyond their role's set, for the one-off case where a person needs a camera or two nobody else in their role should get.

Either way the boundary is the same: a viewer scoped to the two entrance cameras sees only those two, everywhere in every client, live, timeline, clips, and export all respect it. They have no way to know the other cameras exist.

Administrators are the exception: an admin sees every camera and every setting. Keep the number of admins small, and give everyone else a scoped role with just the cameras they need.

Adding a user​

In the admin console's Users & Security section you add a user with a username and password and pick their role. The role already carries its capabilities and its base cameras; for a non-admin you can also grant extra cameras on top, just for that user. They can sign in from any client with those credentials and will be held to exactly that boundary.

Because access is enforced by the server, not the app, a scoped user stays scoped no matter which client they use or how they connect.