Images for people in Home Assistant

In the previous article, a distinction was made between user and person. By default, one person is usually created for each user. And it is used to track the user and create automations for example to turn off the heating when all the people are out of the house.

If you have not changed the Lovelace settings, you will see a person indicator as a badge at the top of the home page. If you have set up a tracker, you will also have information about where the person is located.

However, this icon is always the same for everyone and often looks ugly and difficult to distinguish. The good thing is that it can be changed to an image so that it is easily identifiable. There is no obvious way to associate an image with a person. But there’s a little trick to being able to change it from the Personalization menu or from customize.yaml.

Personalizing people

From the menu Settings -> Customizations select the person you want to assign an icon or image to. The attributes to be changed are icon or entity_picture. The last one will not be displayed in the default menu, you need to select Other and put the attribute name and value.

In the case of icon, the value will be mdi: followed by the chosen icon. You can consult a list of icons in pages like Material Design Icons. It will look something like mdi:alien.

If you want to use an image, you have to use the entity_picture attribute, you can use a web address or upload an image to the www folder in the same directory where the configuration.yaml file is located. For Home Assistant to be able to use the file we will have to change the www address to local (even though the image is actually in www).

Save the changes and the change will be available.

Customize by code

If you prefer to make the change by YAML code. In the file customize.yaml (previously declared in configuration.yaml) use one of the following lines of code.

• To change the icon:

  person.dani:
    icon: mdi:alien
  

• To change the image (by pre-uploading the image to www):

  person.dani:
    entity_picture: "/local/dani.jpg"
  

Reboot the server and that’s it.

Conclusion

With these simple steps the person entity has been configured to give it a more visual aspect and to be easily distinguishable. These steps can be used with almost any entity to improve the appearance of the Home Assistant server interface.

This and other articles complement the documentation of the GitHub repository where all the configuration of my house is available.