mask_privacy not firing

[AndrewPButchart]

I've been using motion for some time and am quite happy with it. I have a 6 camera setup powered by a Raspberry PI 5.

I've pointed one of the cameras at my bird feeder and want to block out the street etc so I used the MotionEye software on another server to create a pgm file that masks out the non-bird area.

I know that the file is being picked up in the configuration during load because I had permission errors that I had to sort out. I can't see anything in the logs that there is an issue but the entire image is showing.

I am using both the mask_privacy and and mask_file options that both point to the same file.

When I view the stream with "show motion" turned on, motion in the area that I blacked out is absolutely being detected.

Any thoughts?

[AndrewPButchart]

Nevermind.

Turns out that I should have read the docs.