Add selector to choose between image and camera entities?

[isaac-mcfadyen]

Problem

Although this is very similar to #608, I'm opening this issue to discuss whether it would be possible to add a selector to control whether image or camera components are visible in Home Assistant.

The main reason for this suggestion is that the image entity type does not currently have feature parody with the camera component. Specifically:

1. As can be seen in Migrate Home Assistant camera to image integration #608, there's not currently a service to save an image from the image entity. A thoughtful community member submitted a Pull Request to the HA core, so hopefully this will be added soon, but for now the PR is a draft and so using image components makes custom automations trickier.
2. The HomeKit integration doesn't support image entities at all, meaning you can't link a binary_sensor to the camera integration and get automatic notifications the way you can with camera. In fact, you can't see snapshots from Frigate within HomeKit at all since there's no support for image entities.

Proposed Change

Because of these issues, I'm wondering if it would be possible to add a toggle to select between exposing image and camera components to Home Assistant. This would allow existing features to work while still allowing users who want the advantages of the image component to migrate to it when they are ready (in fact, image could be default if that is preferable). Aside from the above-mentioned issues, some other custom integrations may be relying on a camera entity and this would allow interoperability with them as well.

Alternatives

One alternative is just to bring image in feature-parody with camera. Work here is ongoing, but it's not just the Home Assistant core that would need to be worked on - built-in integrations like HomeKit as well as any custom integrations would need to be updated too.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[isaac-mcfadyen]

Bumping to keep open.