Blinkar v1.3.0: Detection Filters, Cache Management, and Login Screen Improvements

Blinkar v1.2.0 added on-device object detection — every clip gets tagged as Person, Animal, or Motion. That was useful, but once you have detection labels on everything, the obvious next question is: “Show me only the clips with people in them.” So that’s what v1.3.0 does, along with some quality-of-life improvements I should have shipped sooner.

Filter clips by detection type

There’s now a detection filter in the clip browser, right next to the existing camera filter. Pick Person or Animal and the list narrows instantly. The two filters compose, so you can do things like “Front Porch · Person” in two clicks and see exactly the clips you care about.

This is one of those features that sounds minor but changes how you use the app. Instead of scrolling through a timeline of every leaf and shadow, you jump straight to the clips that actually matter.

Automatic cache management

Blinkar has been caching clip videos and thumbnails locally since v1.0, but it never cleaned up after itself. If you had a lot of cameras, the cache would just grow forever. Not great.

v1.3.0 adds automatic cache management:

• Video cache is capped at 500 MB, thumbnail cache at 50 MB. Oldest files get cleaned up first.
• Clip records older than 90 days (that you’ve already viewed) are pruned from the database.
• All caches now live in ~/Library/Caches/Blinkar/ — the correct macOS location for re-downloadable data, and automatically excluded from Time Machine backups.
• A new Cache section in Settings shows current disk usage and has a Clear Cache button if you want to reclaim space manually.

Login Screen Improvements

The login screen now might work better with 1Password, Bitwarden, Apple Passwords, and other password managers:

• Cmd+V works on the login screen. This was broken due to a macOS quirk with menu bar apps transitioning to showing a window. Embarrassing, but fixed. This definitely works.
• Text fields are tagged with the correct textContentType hints so password managers can identify the email and password fields. This might work, depending on your password manager, and how it looks for username/password fields. No guarantees on this one.
• The 2FA verification code field is tagged for one-time code autofill.

Fixes

• Whitespace trimming — leading and trailing spaces are stripped from the email and password before login. If you’ve ever copy-pasted credentials and gotten a silent auth failure, this was probably why.

Get it

Blinkar v1.3.0 is available now on Gumroad. If you already own it, just re-download for the update.

• Buy Blinkar on Gumroad
• Visit the Blinkar website