Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Only get alerted when something happens in an area you care about
Ring Video Doorbells are excellent pieces of kit to have monitoring the front or back of your home. They not only allow you to answer the door when you’re not home, but they will also detect motion and alert you if something doesn’t seem right.
If like us, you have your Ring Video Doorbell on the front of your home and you have a sidewalk in front, you might want to consider setting up Camera Motion Zones to make sure that when those alerts come through that they are actually helpful, rather than just someone strolling passed your house.
We have a separate feature for setting up Privacy Zones on your Ring device, as well as adjust your motion settings, but here we are talking about how to setup Camera Motion Zones on your Ring Video Doorbell and Ring camera.
What you’ll need
- A smartphone or tablet
- The Ring app
- Your Ring Video Doorbell
The short version
- Open the Ring app.
- Find your Ring Video Doorbell.
- Tap on ‘Motion Settings‘.
- Tap on ‘Camera Motion Zones‘.
- Tap on ‘Add Motion Zone‘.
- Create your zone.
- Rename Zone and press done.
- Press ‘Save‘ in top right.
How to setup Camera Motion Zones and what they do
Ring has a number of different ways to filter your motion settings. If you have a compatible device, you can set up Bird’s Eye Zones, while Smart Alerts allow you to get motion alerts and recordings for the alerts you want, like people or packages. They require a Ring Protect Subscription however, so that’s worth keeping in mind.
When it comes to Camera Motion Zones, these allow you to draw area within your Ring Video Doorbell – or Ring camera’s – field of view, specifying that’s where you want the device to watch for motion.
If you set up Camera Motion Zones, your Ring device will only detect motion inside these areas and it will ignore things like the sidewalk, or a bush that might blow a lot when it is windy and trigger false motion alerts.
Time needed: 5 minutes
- Open the Ring app and head to Motion Settings
To set up Camera Motion Zones, you will need to open the Ring app on your smartphone or tablet and make sure you are on the Ring device you want to set Camera Motion Zones up for. You then need to find the Motion Settings tile and tap on that to get to Camera Motion Zones.
- Create your Camera Motion Zones
You’ll see Camera Motion Zones in the list, tap on that to see any current zones, including Bird’s Eye Zones. You’ll then need to select ‘Add Motion Zone’.
- Draw your Camera Motion Zone and save
Once you have tapped on’Add Motion Zone’, a square will appear across the snapshot of your Ring device’s field of view. You can pull the various points on the square to expand the zone or make it smaller. You should then add a name to your zone, especially if you have a couple of zones. This will make it easier to work out where motion has been detected when an alert comes through, rather than the notification saying ‘Motion detected in Zone 1’. Make sure you press ‘Done’ and ‘Save’.
That’s it. All done. Your Ring device will now only alert you when motion is detected in that area.
FAQs
You pretty much follow the same steps as setting up as a Camera Motion Zone. When you open up Camera Motion Zones, you will need to tap on ‘Edit Zone’, and then ‘Delete Zone’ to get rid of a zone.
When you set up Camera Motion Zones, you will only be notified of motion that occurs within that zone. Video recording will still happen around the Camera Motion Zone, so if you don’t want that to happen, setup a Privacy Zone instead.
