Frigate 0.18.0 is out: the first stable of the 0.18 line, published 12 September after a run of betas. The config moves into the UI, profiles swap camera settings without a restart, and the snapshot files on disk change format.
Before you upgrade
Back up the config file and frigate.db. Frigate attempts the config migration itself, but manual changes may still be required: zones and masks change format to add enabled and friendly_name.
Intel GPU stats now read the kernel’s DRM counters instead of intel_gpu_top, dropping the privileged mode and CAP_PERFMON requirement but needing a host kernel of 6.5 or newer. FFmpeg 8, on every image but Rockchip, breaks go2rtc’s hardware transcodes with [hwupload] A hardware device reference is required until you set go2rtc -> ffmpeg -> global: "-vaapi_device /dev/dri/renderD128". Pinning ffmpeg.path to 7.0 avoids it. The 0.18 FAQ lists the symptom as higher CPU use on Intel hosts.
Anyone running JinaV2 embeddings on a GPU needs a reindex.
What breaks
Frigate no longer writes annotated JPEGs to disk. You get one clean WebP per event, clean_copy is gone, and snapshots.quality drops from 70 to 60 for the new encoding. Anything reading those files off disk wants the /api/events/<id>/snapshot.jpg endpoint instead.
Also gone: DELETE /api/export (post to /api/exports now), sync_recordings (replaced by the Media Sync pane), timelapse_args, and ui.date_format with ui.time_format. The DeGirum detector is removed, since the company stopped operating on 1 August. DeepStack is deprecated and goes in 0.19. GenAI config becomes a per-provider mapping with a new roles field, which migrates on its own.
What you’re upgrading for
Most of the config is editable in the UI now, and much of it applies without a restart. Profiles override detection, motion, recording, review and enrichments per camera, and switch live from the UI or over MQTT. Debug Replay runs recorded footage through the detection pipeline, so motion settings can be tuned without waiting for a real event. Exports get named cases. HTTP/2 is on in nginx, which the notes call a significant Live and History improvement on port 8971 past a couple of cameras.
My read
Both traps are documented and the migration is mostly automatic. Back up the database and check the host kernel version before you pull the image.