VPN and maintain notification thumbnails?

[IPDaily]

So I've been dabbling with BlueIris for a few weeks now and overall I am really happy with it, however one area I still haven't settled on for sure is port forwarding vs VPN. I know ideally I should be using VPN, however it is an additional bit of faff activating it on my phone before I open the BI app if I am out and about, plus if I close off the port forwarding this seems to prevent the thumbnail images for notifications coming through to the phone.

Is there something I am missing when it comes to the notifications and thumbnails or will it just not work if I don't use port forwarding? If I do stick with port forwarding is using stunnel and SSL particularly recommended? It isn't something I've ever used before. I saw something called ngrok - is that something that would offer similar protection?

 

[fenderman]

So I've been dabbling with BlueIris for a few weeks now and overall I am really happy with it, however one area I still haven't settled on for sure is port forwarding vs VPN. I know ideally I should be using VPN, however it is an additional bit of faff activating it on my phone before I open the BI app if I am out and about, plus if I close off the port forwarding this seems to prevent the thumbnail images for notifications coming through to the phone.

Is there something I am missing when it comes to the notifications and thumbnails or will it just not work if I don't use port forwarding? If I do stick with port forwarding is using stunnel and SSL particularly recommended? It isn't something I've ever used before. I saw something called ngrok - is that something that would offer similar protection?

the alert images were recently added...there are issues with receiving on lan...
ngrok is just as unsafe as port forwarding unless you setup password protection and you rely on it being effective.