Frigate 0.16.0 → 0.18.0

There are several breaking changes in this release, Frigate will attempt to update the configuration automatically. In some cases manual changes may be required. It is always recommended to back up your current config and database before upgrading:

1. Simply copy your current config file to a new location
2. Stop Frigate and make a copy of the frigate.db file

• GenAI now supports reviews and object descriptions. As a result, the global genai config now only configures the provider. Other fields have moved under objects -> genai. See the new GenAI documentation.
• Recordings retention is now fully tiered. This means that record -> continuous and record -> motion are separate config fields. See the examples in the documentation.
• Some of the LPR models have been updated, and most users should manually switch to the small model, which performs well on both CPU and GPU. The large model is the same as 0.16's and is not as accurate as the upgraded small model in 0.17. Use large only if you live in a region with multi-line plates and you are having issues detecting text on them with the small model.
• strftime_fmt was deprecated in 0.16, and should now be fully removed from the config in 0.17. Date/time formatting is based on the language selected in the UI.
• The auto detection logic for camera resolution has changed. Some cameras fail to correctly advertise their resolution, and in previous versions, a default value was assumed that was not always correct. You may need to explicitly define detect resolution width and height for cameras in your config if Frigate hangs on startup.
• The exec, expr, and echo sources for go2rtc are now removed by default to reduce the security risk if an attacker has access to the configuration. This can be disabled using an environment variable GO2RTC_ALLOW_ARBITRARY_EXEC A separate configuration for this for HA addon users will come in a later beta. See the documentation.
• Nvidia GTX 900 series GPUs are no longer supported due to updates to ONNX Runtime

There are several breaking changes in this release, Frigate will attempt to update the configuration automatically. In some cases manual changes may be required. It is always recommended to back up your current config and database before upgrading:

1. Simply copy your current config file to a new location
2. Stop Frigate and make a copy of the frigate.db file

• GenAI now supports multiple providers. As a result, the global genai config is now a mapping of keys to GenAI provider setups, and a new roles field defines what tasks each provider will be used for (object descriptions, review summaries, embeddings, chat, etc.). Existing configs will be automatically migrated. Documentation
• Frigate no longer saves annotated JPEG snapshots (.jpg) to disk. Only a clean, unannotated WebP snapshot (<camera>-<id>-clean.webp) is now stored in /media/frigate/clips/. The clean_copy configuration option has been removed — clean snapshots are always saved when snapshots are enabled. The snapshots.quality default has changed from 70 to 60, reflecting the switch from JPEG to WebP encoding. Users who previously relied on the annotated .jpg files on disk should instead use the /api/events/<id>/snapshot.jpg endpoint, which now honors timestamp, bounding_box, crop, height, and quality query parameters for both in-progress and completed tracked objects. When query parameters are omitted, the camera's snapshots config values are used as defaults. Existing configs containing clean_copy will be automatically migrated. Documentation
• The config format for zones and masks has changed to add enabled and friendly_name fields. A config migrator will make the necessary changes, but if migration fails you may need to edit your masks and zones manually.
• Intel GPU stats reporting has changed to no longer require intel_gpu_top and now reads directly from the kernel's per-client DRM usage counters. This removes the need for CAP_PERFMON, privileged mode, or perf_event_paranoid tuning, and adds support for newer Intel GPUs (including Battlemage). Reported usage values may differ from previous versions because the measurement method has changed; the underlying GPU workload is unchanged for the same configuration.
• Note that this change will require a Linux kernel version of 6.5 or newer on your host. Kernels older than 6.5 do not expose per-engine counters for GPUs using GuC submission.
• FFmpeg has been updated to version 8 (excluding the -rk image), and introduces a known issue with go2rtc streams that transcode video using hardware acceleration. A small change to the go2rtc config is required. Documentation
• FFmpeg 5 is deprecated and will be removed from Frigate in 0.19.
• Users running the JinaV2 semantic search model on a GPU will need to run an embeddings reindex due to changes to the CUDA graphs optimization level.
• The /api/export DELETE HTTP API endpoint has been removed and refactored to support bulk deletion of exports. A POST to /api/exports should be used instead. Documentation
• The sync_recordings config option has been removed and replaced by the new Media Sync pane in Settings.
• The timelapse_args export config option has been removed and replaced by custom exporting ffmpeg arguments. Documentation
• The ui.date_format and ui.time_format config options have been removed as these fields have been unused since date/time format and handling has been determined by i18n.
• The DeGirum detector has been removed as the company has ceased operations effective 1 Aug 2026.
• The DeepStack detector is deprecated and will be removed from Frigate in 0.19.