Photographically meaningful camera menus 13 November 2025

 

In the days of film photography and manual cameras there was no such thing as a “menu” of optional settings. We could set the film speed then control aperture and  shutter speed. We could focus manually. We advanced the film after each exposure. After 36 exposures we rewound the film back into its cassette.  And that was our lot. It was really very simple. A bit slow and a bit limited by modern standards but really simple.

As cameras embraced electronic controls and digital capture they became vastly more complex. Today’s models come with a 900 page instruction manual and a mind boggling list of hundreds of user selected settings.

This has led to a system of menus by which the user can make their personal choice for each item.

Inevitably, early versions of menus were camera designer techie-geek centric. Some early menu systems contained a plethora of items which presumably made sense to some guy in the backrooms somewhere but were totally confusing to the people actually trying to use the camera.

Camera menus have improved but are still a long way from presenting a photographer-focussed approach to listing and navigating the multitude of items now commonly provided.

This is the Camera Ergonomics blog so the vexed issue of menus has long been on my agenda for thinking about and devising a better way.

In this post I present my suggested approach to an improved menu layout using the items in my camera which is a Canon EOS R7.

I have drawn some inspiration for this proposal from the menu system and layout featured in the current Hasselblad X2D100C cameras.

To keep things reasonably simple in this post I will just look at the menu items which appear when the On/Off lever is set to ON (for still photos) and the Mode Dial is set to Fv, Tv, Av, P or M. 

A different set of menu items appear when the camera is set to Movie (on this camera, using the ON/Off switch) or when the green Basic Zone or SCN or Creative Filters settings are used on the Mode Dial, but I don’t want to get into those in this post.

Canon has made some progress in framing their menu headings in photographically meaningful ways. In The R7 we have separate headings for  [Autofocus], [Playback] and [Connectivity]. But we still have  photographically meaningless headings such as  [Camera, red], [Wrench, yellow] and  [Camera, orange].

In my proposed schema:

When we press the [Menu] button once, a screen like the one below appears.

Quick Control	My Menu	Exposure	Focus	Image	Display
Controls	Drive	Stabiliser	Connectivity	Power	Storage
Setup	General	Review	Movie	Framing	Flash

 

That is 18 locations. I envisage words in bold type over a pictogram at each location.

There is plenty of space on the monitor screen for this layout.

The first two are supplementary menus which will be visited most often once the camera is set up to personal preference. Press an allocated button once or the [Menu] button twice quickly to go straight to the [Quick Control] Menu.

This is populated according to personal preference as is current Canon practice.

[My Menu] is populated by the user according to personal preference as is current practice.

Each of the other locations leads us to a photographically meaningful set of menus and sub menus as required.

Anyone who already knows their way around a camera will immediately understand the purpose of each location. Beginners will be able to match an understanding of the menus with their growing knowledge of camera functions.  We always need a “general” category for items which don’t fit elsewhere.

For the exercise I have re-allocated existing Canon R7 menus items into my proposed photo logical categories.

I have also suggested some items which I think could safely be removed from the menus as I have never used them and I have never read or seen a setup advice which recommends setting these items to anything other than default.  Modern cameras have many options which I suspect are there because they can be or because they have been on the Canon menu list for several years without user review,  not because anybody asked for them.

Exposure     At present, exposure items are scattered about across several submenus.

Expo.Comp / AEB

ISO Speed settings

HDR Shooting HDR PQ  (remove)

HDR Mode  (remove)

Auto Lighting Optimiser

Highlight Tone Priority

Anti flicker shooting

Metering Mode

White Balance

Custom White Balance

White Balance Shift Bkt (remove)

Color space

Multiple exposure

Silent shutter function

Shutter Mode (ms, efcs, es)

Release shutter W/O card

Exposure level increments

ISO speed setting increments

Speed from metering ISO Auto

Bracketing auto cancel

Bracketing sequence (remove)

Number of bracketed shots

Safety shift

Same exp for new aperture (remove)

AE Lock meter mode after focus (remove)

Set shutter speed range

Set aperture range

Focus    Most focus items have been gathered into the [Autofocus] section but there are still some scattered about elsewhere.

Focus bracketing

AF Operation

AF area

Subject tracking

Subject to detect

Eye detection

Switching tracked subjects

Focus mode

Servo AF options

One shot release priority

Preview AF (remove)

Lens drive when AF impossible

AF assist beam firing

Touch and drag AF settings

Limit AF Areas

* Sensitivity-AF Pt select

Orientation linked AF point

MF peaking settings

Focus guide

Electronic full time MF

Lens electronic MF

RF lens MF ring sensitivity

Image   Clarify which apply to JPG and which to Raw image capture

Image quality

Dual pixel Raw (remove)

Picture Style

Clarity (remove)

Shooting creative filters (remove from main menus)

Lens aberration correction

Long exposure noise reduction

High ISO speed noise reduction

Dust delete data

Display

Auto level

Display simulation

OVF Sim view assist (remove)

Shooting Info. Disp.

Reverse display

VF Display format

Display performance

Help text size

Mode Guide

Screen/VF display

Screen brightness

VF brightness

Screen/VF color tone

Fine tune VF color tone

UI Magnification

Copyright info.

Manual/Software URL

Certification Logo display

Firmware version

Show log

Add cropping information

Controls

Customize Quick Controls

Touch shutter (remove)

Focus ring rotation

Touch control

Multifunction lock

Switch AF/MF enable/disable

Dial direction to set TV/AV (remove)

Lens ring direction to set Tv/Av (remove)

Switch dials when shooting (remove)

Customize buttons

Customize dials

Clear customized settings

Drive

Drive Mode

Interval timer

Raw Burst Mode (allow allocation to a button)

Bulb timer

Release shutter without lens

Stabiliser

Image stabiliser mode

Connectivity

WiFi Bluetooth connection

Airplane mode

WiFi settings

Bluetooth settings

Nickname

GPS device settings

Reset communication settings

Choose uSB connection App

Power

Power saving

Battery info.

Storage

Record func+ card/folder sel. (this item needs to be expressed more clearly)

File numbering

File name

Format card

Auto rotate

Setup

Date/Time zone

Language

Beep

Volume

Headphones

Shutter at shutdown

Sensor cleaning

Custom shooting mode

Reset camera

Manage password

Default erase option

Retract lens at power off

Clear all custom functions

General

Print order

Photobook setup

 

Review

Protect images

Erase images

Rotate stills

Change Mov Rotate info

Rating

Image copy

Raw image processing

Creative assist

Quick control raw processing

Cloud raw processing

Playback creative filters

Resize

Cropping

HEIF to JPG conversion

Slide show

Set image search conditions

View from last seen

Magnification

Image jump

Playback info  disp

Highlight alert

AF point disp

Playback grid

HDMI HDR output

Movie  (red button)

Movie rec size

Sound recording

Movie ISO speed settings

Movie auto slow shutter

Movie auto level

Shutter button func for movie

Movie servo AF

Movie play count

Video system PAL/NTSC

Add movie rotate info

Framing 

Still image aspect ratio

Flash 

External speedlite control

That’s the list, to which I would add Autofocus Lock, which Canon cameras lack but which I find very useful on the Pana-Lumix cameras which do have this capability.

 

Summary

In this post I present a photography-centric approach to camera menus, using the Canon EOS R7 as an example.

I think many photographers would welcome a camera menu system like this.