Security Cams Feature Request

I would think that the feature of being able to turn the cameras off and on would be a top priority for Ring. Just think of all the data storage space they could save. I know they have been storing 2 hours of me mowing my lawn every week. If only half of their users could turn off their cameras for only 15 minutes each week, they could save quite a bit.

9 Likes
  1. Motion Scheduling (more like Motion Block Notification) should ask what motion zone (all or specific zone selected) the rule applies to.

This is important, because I may want to block out my custom “Street” zone at certain times, or my custom “Sidewalk” zone at other times. But I may never want to block my “Driveway” zone from sending notifications.

  1. A “Short Chirp” sound or other quick Alert Tone would be nice. This “Chirp” could then be tied into motion rules when a zone is tripped. So, for example, burglar starts approaching home at 1am… camera spots motion and sends a quick 2 second “Chirp” to scare off intruder before they even consider getting any closer.

  2. Option to turn off Blue Light on Camera.

7 Likes

I would really like the ability to dim the floodlight cams lights.

On one of my floodlights that we have on all night the angle that I need the light positioned and the fact that there is a slope leading up to it causes it to be a blinding light in people’s eyes when coming up our driveway.

If there were a way to dim the lights that are on because of a schedule that would be really helpful for those of us that need to run the lights all night and find your required led lights to be too bright. Plus it would save energy.

A lot of the times people put up a floodlight cam it’s to replace a existing always on dusk to dawn floodlight that before we went SMART with the ring floodlight we could easily change the bulb to adjust the brightness and that’s not possible with the ring floodlights. I assume I would void the warranty if I replaced the light fixture with a traditional light bulb socket that would allow me to change to dimmer bulb. This really should be a option if you don’t allow dimming. Or in the alternative sell a ring floodlight without the required led fixture installed allowing us to customize ones lighting options.

Thank you in advance for any consideration you give to this thought.

1 Like
  1. There should be a setting to disable the infrared lights so the camera can be placed behind glass. At night the camera becomes useless if behind glass because the IR just reflects.

  2. There should be a setting to rotate the image. I have monted one of my cameras sideways in order to fit in a specific location. Upside down, sideways, backwards . . . image rotation.

1 & 2 above are done by just about every camera manufacturer out there. I am surprised they were not in the first release.

  1. The pause setting should allow you to stop recording, not just notifications. Privacy matters. Make it an option. And allow us to turn it off until we turn it on again, not just a few hours at a time, as an option.

  2. Integrate with Ring Alarm. Let the alarm siren also sound on the cameras, let the cameras record based on the alarm mode (only when away for example), let the camera motion set off a chime in the alarm (just like the window or door chime) so we instantly know without carrying a phone around the house. Those are the obvious ones that come to mind.

OK, having said all that . . . I like the POE sitck up cam. POE is a must, image and sound quality is good, setup is super easy. The motion detection is sophisticated and better than any other camera I have used…

1 Like

After seeing the release of the two new cameras and the one being for indoor only I realy hope there will be a way to disable the camera in the very near future. I would get one or two of the indoor camera’s, but not unless you are able to disable them. If they can be disabled via Geofencing that would be best.

1 Like

It has potential but get the basics right.

  1. Time limited recordings - seriously. If you have movement, DONT STOP RECORDING!!! The time out should stop AFTER the LAST movement detection. NOT DURING. Wow!! Big fail!! Why should you have to live view to record everything??

  2. If the unit stops recording for any reason (in the current case time outs) and there is a new motion detected THEN START RECORDING AGAIN IMMEDIATELY! Why would you wait? Someone has a serious fettish with time outs.

  3. Add an option during live viewing to record. You have a camera, why can i not tell it to record or not. Just because you live view doesnt mean you want it to record. You could save lots of storage space.

  4. Can you even snap a photo during live view? Or snap a photo during watching a recording?

  5. The Windows App - I have it running on my desktop so I can view what is going on at any time but it times out! Why? Like above, just want to view what is going on around premesis, just record if there is movement or I click the record button.

  6. Allow viewing of multi cameras, not just one camera

  7. add live view to the Web Browser.

To put the above in perspective, I had the camera on the drive, it recorded 1.06 mins and cut out as the person put something in the boot. Didnt show what they did after that or the car even leaving right in front on the camera!!! And it was not sensitivity settings - it was the poor design to limit recordings to time rather than actual activity happening.

There are other features I can think of to add but these are what I would call basics. Not recording because a time out has been reached is just plain dumb!

I am testing with one camera - just purchased - not impressed, wont be purchasing the other 3 I need unless this gets fixed as it is not fit for purpose if it does not record ALL motion for the full length of the activity in progress. Please fix this asap and can you provide an ETA?

13 Likes

Amazon Fire TV App for camera viewing. It would be nice to have a TV app that would let you continually monitor all your cameras. Like on most NVR based camera systems, where you can watch 4 or 8 cameras on a monitor. One easy way to do this with the Ring cameras would be with a Fire TV app using your LAN. No external bandwidth needed.

1 Like

The timeout recording limitation renders this security camera basically useless. I have seen many posts on the “Neighbors” site where a crime may have been committed but the camera stopped recording and never actually recorded the crime! Criminals have become smarter than the Ring system and trigger the camera and wait for it to timeout before committing the crime.

9 Likes

On motion, an option to send an email with attached images. This is a pretty common feature in IP Cams, and in many situations is more useful than a notification which requires action.

4 Likes

Not sure when this feature was added, it must have been in the last update or two. When I checked the motions settings on my two solar powered cameras I was very happy to see it now shows a screen shot of what is covered now. My one camera I was not sure why it was not pickup up motion like I thought. This is a great help. Now I can tweek that camera for a little better setup.

I still wish I could setup motion zones like a plug in camera though. Right now doing Solar and two batteries my power has never gone below 88% on one battery and the other has always stated at 100%. Shocked how good the battery life is.

1 Like

I would like to see Ring update security cams with an outdoor weather station feature from each camera or if not possible from current cams, as a special outdoor add on module. The “Ring Weather Observer” could report outdoor temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, UV and solar radiation, barometric pressure and perhaps report dew point and rainfall rate and provide detailed trends for barometer, temperature and humidity. I have ring cameras at my vacation home and would like to know what is going on there. It would be a cool add on for sure.

Oh yeah and by the way, I should get credit for the idea :smiley:

1 Like

I’m reposting here what I posted on Reddit earlier today, since someone pointed me to the Ring Community forum.

I’m trying to move away from the Nest Ecosystem, but man, Ring is making it tough without some basic quality of life features.

I’m really unhappy with changes Google/Nest have made lately with their API and recording indicators. I have 4 cameras (2 indoor, 2 outdoor), all with Nest Aware. I’ve never actually properly installed the outdoor cameras, because I really don’t like the idea of drilling through a wall to securely plug it in, or running wiring along my house to plug a security camera into an easily accessible outdoor outlet.

I love that Ring has a floodlight camera. I replaced my existing floodlight last night with the Ring Floodlight. Getting a hardwired external camera, and smart lighting which I can control remotely is a huge win.

I was concerned with Ring not providing continuous recording like Nest does, especially when they claimed that it was going to become available and then all records of that claim being scrubbed from the Internet. The motion recordings do seem like they’re catching things very well, however. So I’m pretty happy with that.

That said, I’m having a real hard time with the user experience Ring provides.

Notifications. Make it so we can tell at a glance of the phone if something requires more attention. Currently we get the most generic notification in the world, and have to open up the app, wait for it to load the video, and then scrub through to find out if anything important happened. It’s bad to the point where I’ve had it set up for literally less than an entire day and I’m already simply ignoring notifications.

  • Give more description than “There is a motion”. Everything is a motion. Is it a person? Car? Animal?
  • Tell me which zone was the motion in!
  • Give me a preview of what the camera caught, at the very least a still image to review without having to open up the app, wait for it to load the video, and scrub through to see wtf happened.

Website. It’s basically an afterthought.

  • I can’t change any settings.
  • I can’t create or modify or view zones.
  • I can’t control the lights.
  • I can’t share footage.
  • The history list is as generic and unhelpful as the Notifications, and would be improved with the same changes.
  • Give me the event history timeline like the phone offers for quickly scrubbing through all recordings from the day.
2 Likes

I just bought two indoor cams to replace my Amazon Cloud cams. I did this because I want to have one source (and one storage fee) for all of my devices. But I was dissappointed that the following features were missing from the indoor cameras:

  • Geofencing that turns the Cameras off entirely when my phone is at home. I do not want to be recorded in my own house

  • And/of the ability to turn the cameras off on a schedule.

I also wish the apps would know the cameras power source and treat them accordingly -i.e. longer recording times for hardwired devices.

5 Likes

It would be nice if the motion detector could be adjust independently of the camera on the floodlight setup.

1 Like

Hello,

I would love to be able to set multiple zones for my outdoor flood spotlight camera AND then designate which zone I would like to monitor for sound. As it is now, I turn off all volumne at night on the camera and record only as I dont want to be woken up multiple times during the night by cars on the street or people walking by on the sidewalk. I would like to set a separate zone closed in tight on my kids’ cars, and another zone of the area beyond, but only choose to hear the chime on the specific zone that I chose.
Please!!!

Thank you,

Debbie

2 Likes

Update - This from support:

In regards with your concern, we are currently looking up into this option to be added in the near future, this means that it will be now the device owner’s discretion if they want to have a longer duration of recordings or a shorter one once the device starts recording. The main reason why we set it up this way for now is mainly because we want to make sure that the battery operated devices will not drain fast as well as you can save data charges if you’re accessing the videos in mobile data.

Watch this space, let’s hope ‘near future’ means… well near!

4 Likes

Thanks for passing that info along. It would be better if Ring support actually posted it themselves here in the forum.

I hope that they set this up so that we can control the time that the recording continues “after motion has stopped”. If it is set up where we can only select a time from when motion starts it becomes ineffective and wasteful of data. If I were only able to select 1, 3 or 5 minutes and I chose 1 minute, then I would not be able to capture a crime that takes longer than 1 minute. If I select 5 minutes and a bird lands on my driveway, I would get a 5 minute recording of nothing. This is how it is set up now with my Wired Floodlight cam. I get multiple 1 minute videos every time the motion is triggered.

I, along with a host of other Ring customers, would love to see the ability to “name” a device, and have the verbal alert in the app be able to use that name or perhaps just add a far more robust list of pre-programmed alert names to differentiate devices. For example, I have 3 separate Battery/Solar powered Spotlight cams at different points on my property, but when alerted of motion, the app does not give me the specific location, which is kind of important if someone is trying to break in. Instead, it just states motion detected by Spotlight Cam or something lime that…yet, via Alexa integration, my Echo Device will state the actual name I programmed for a particular camera. The last thing you want to do is fumble with the app trying to go through 7 different cameras before acting. I know you can play different sounds to identify which device, but it would be much more helpful to add 20 specific name choices like: Front Porch Cam, Side Yard Cam, Back Yard Cam, Pool Cam, etc.

Also, when viewing the dashboard, I’ve noticed that only the hard-wired cameras update more frequently, whereas you must update the battery-operated cameras manually by entering them. Ring should add a global refresh button to the dashboard so a person can monitor ALL in real time, at will. I understand the battery life issue for those without the solar panel, but with the solar panel, my battery barely moves off of 100%, so I feel confident that my devices could support my request. Even just offering the option would be a huge help.

Please consider a refresh button next to the global system snooze button. Ideally, one could designate how often to refresh the cameras in the settings. Would be great to have a real-time dashboard viewing option for the entire system too.

1 Like

Add Audio Alerts.

Our Arlo system had the ability to monitor for audio so we could start recording when the dogs were barking in their kennel.

I am a bit confused by your request. I have indoor, solar powered stick-up, and doorbell cams - I have assigned names to all of them, AND when I get alerts, the alert tells me which cam detected the motion (i.e. Motion Detected in your Backyard).

For reference, I am using the Windows and Android apps.