Since its launch in 2016, the MV smart camera has been making the deployment of security cameras hassle-free for network administrators and security camera specialists. With onboard storage and management through the Meraki dashboard, from anywhere, the MV camera is essentially plug-and-play. However, for larger deployments with different coverage scenarios and target use cases, one can spend a lot of time and a lot of clicks customizing settings across all cameras and networks.

With the new quality and retention profiles and APIs, you can now deploy your cameras faster than ever before. 

Bulk configure using profiles on the dashboard

Each camera deployment faces unique requirements. Some cameras, like the ones facing entrances, or monitoring important assets, may need to record with the highest resolution, frame rate and bitrate, for the most amount of detail when identifying faces. Some sites have strict retention requirements and may require scheduled recording, motion-based retention and the lowest resolution and quality. With profiles, everything under the camera’s “Quality and retention” tab can be combined together and applied in one go.

After creating quality and retention profiles on the dashboard, you can then easily select multiple cameras within a network and bulk-assign them the same settings. 

More information on using the quality and retention profiles can be found on the Meraki Documentation site.

Work even smarter using APIs

On top of being able to use profiles to quickly apply settings to multiple cameras, you can work even faster by using a number of APIs that provide more freedom and automation. 

You can perform the following actions using APIs:

• Quality and retention profiles (for a given network)
  • List the quality retention profiles 
  • Create new quality retention profile
  • Retrieve a single quality retention profile
  • Update an existing quality retention profile
  • Delete an existing quality retention profile
• Individual quality and retention settings (for a given camera)
  • Return a list of all camera recording schedules
  • Return quality and retention settings 
  • Update quality and retention settings (individually, or using a profile)

More information on the APIs can be found under the Meraki Developer Hub.

Do you have an upcoming deployment? Visit our documentation for more information on how to use quality and retention profiles. Let us know what you think on the Meraki Community page!