Saving camera configuration to a memory card is one of the most useful features for all EOS R5 owners that’s added in the firmware 1.3.0 update.
I’m pretty sure that many people who have the EOS R5 and primarily shoot stills will look at the great new video related capabilities with a little bit of a “so what” attitude, but there’s something for them in the update too. You can now back up your camera configuration. This frees video and still shooters to freely experiment with settings in the knowledge that they can return to known working conditions in just a few seconds. If you’re in the fortunate position of having multiple EOS R5 cameras you can easily match the config of them too. Or if you rent a camera you can load your config and be ready to go straightway.
Whenever a camera has a multitude of camera settings that need to be optimised for the best results on a specific subject there’s always a need to save setups. For most cameras this means using the custom shooting modes, but for the EOS R5 with firmware 1.3.0 and EOS-1D models since the EOS-D Mark III you can save the camera setup to a memory card. It was back in 2015 that I wrote my request for Canon to add saving the setup for my EOS 5D Mark III.
Saving camera configuration settings to a card
Once you’ve done the firmware update to 1.3.0 on your EOS R5 you’ll find a new menu item on the SET UP5 menu screen. It looks just like the menus from EOS-1D cameras with the same capability.
Tap the menu item, or press the SET button to choose if you’re saving to a card, or loading from a card.
Obviously you can’t load a settings file until you save one, so select save to card initially.
Canon has a default naming scheme for the files, that follows past cameras, though by pressing the INFO button you can use a name that makes more sense to you, maybe something with a date, or type of settings being saved. If you change the filename, your chosen name must have 8 characters, anything less is not accepted.
Your settings file is saved to the root of the currently active card, and here I was using the CFexpress card. If you want it on another card you’ll need to change card before starting the save process. Files are not very large, the one I made was 394KB in size. With the card in your computer you can rename the file, as long as you keep 8 uppercase characters in the filename and don’t movie it from the root folder. You can also have multiple configuration files on the same card, this is where the naming becomes more useful.
Loading stored settings from a card
Restoring saved settings from a card is similarly straightforward. Choose load, select the file on the card, hit OK and then wait for the settings to load. I takes just a few moments for the settings to install, and they will replace all other settings in your camera. There’s no way to restore just a part of the configuration.
Hey Canon, please, pretty please, add this to the EOS R6
Now as an EOS R6 owner, with essentially the same range of settings as the EOS R5 I really want that “save to card” feature for my camera. It would be so good to be able to reset my camera to defaults prior to a training session knowing that it was so easy to get my optimised config back after the training.
Hi Brian,
If you do a backup and then reset the cameras Basic settings and Other settings in Set-up menu tab 5. When the backup is restored to the camera Copyright and Communication settings will need to be manually entered. As far as I can see they are not restored.
Hi Derek,
Thanks for that update – seems a bit unexpected as normally that does come across with other cameras that have the feature I tried in the past.
Brian / p4pictures
Thanks for the information Brian. I just picked up another R5 body since my first one in January. I’ve been wishing that Canon would catch up to the other manufacturers that already offered this.
Hi John,
Canon have had this ability on EOS-1D models since EOS-1D Mark III, but it’s been requested a lot for other models in the range that have similarly extensive configuration setting flexibility.
I hope that it will also come to EOS R6 soon too.
Brian / p4pictures
Thanks Brian,
I just got a R6 yesterday and spent an hour manually copying as many R5 settings as I could. Not fun! To make matters worse, I notice there’s a dull rattle of something sizable inside the R6 when I turn it over. It must have gotten UPS shaken. So I’ll be repeating the settings ritual when I get the replacement body. Ugh!
Take care,
John
Scratch that last post. I think I figured out that it’s the IBIS when the body is powered off. It’s the same behavior in my R5. I just never noticed it in either of my R5’s before.
If you format the card to clear out the pictures the backup files are deleted. Any way around this other than to keep a separate card just for configurations?
Hi Robert,
Pretty much the simplest is keep a card for configurations. An old small SD card would be fine for this purpose. You can also copy the configuration files from the card to a computer and put them back later if you need.
Brian / p4pictures
If only Canon would think this a useful enough feature to have just a few MB’s of memory/disk space built into the camera so we wouldn’t have to have a separate card just for our various cam settings. One can hope.
Hi Patrick,
That’s a neat idea, but probably the opposite to the original intended use of the feature.
Originally this save to card function was so agency photographers who use multiple cameras or have loan kit can transfer the settings from on camera to others. So they setup one camera and then can save the settings to a card that then goes in the next camera to load the settings from.
I can see for most photographers who only have the single camera that saving to internal memory would be useful, but if you change camera or rent an extra one you’d still have no possibility to load the camera with your preferred settings. This is why being able to save the configuration to a computer using EOS Utility might be a better idea than internal memory.
Brian / p4pictures
Or the ability to save to both, or either. I have different settings for different types of shoots down to whether shooting video in 4k or 1920 and all the associated settings so when I am doing that type of shoot pop the card in and load it. It would be beneficial to have that internal. I’ve used it effectively as you suggest, when renting cameras, so I understand that point of view.