A few months back I found myself in a camera shop, fiddling with a backpack that had interchangeable cubes, laser-cut MOLLE loops, a removable hip belt, and enough velcro dividers to reorganize a small apartment. The salesperson kept saying the word modular like it was a fresh invention. I just nodded, because I've seen this film before. In a 1970s Domke. In a 1940s musette bag. In the webbing on a soldier's rucksack. Modularity isn't a feature someone dreamed up last year. It's a habit photographers have had for a century: refuse to be stuck with one bag, borrow whatever works, and then get sold that same adaptation back as a breakthrough.
The first modular camera bags were not camera bags
Before dedicated camera backpacks, photographers used wooden cases, leather satchels, and the same canvas packs soldiers and mountaineers carried. Large format shooters in the 1920s and 1930s often transported lenses, film holders, and dark cloths in hard cases with fitted slots. But a fitted case becomes useless the moment your kit changes in the field. So photographers improvised.
They bought surplus gas mask bags, map cases, musette bags, fishing creels. Then they sewed in cloth dividers, added leather straps, stuffed in wool padding. A press photographer running to a news scene might carry a Speed Graphic in one hand and a re-stitched military bag full of film holders over the other shoulder. Nobody called it modular. It was just field repair.
That distinction matters. Modularity didn't start as a design philosophy. It started as necessity. The first modular camera bags weren't products at all. They were photographers making do, cutting and sewing until the bag matched the job. In modern terms, we tend to think modular means buying one bag that does everything. Historically, it meant the opposite: owning many small, specific containers and combining them differently depending on the day.
Velcro and the birth of the padded divider
The next big shift came from a material that had nothing to do with photography: hook-and-loop fastening. Swiss engineer George de Mestral invented Velcro in the 1940s, and by the late 1950s it was common enough that designers could build rearrangeable interiors without sewing. For camera bags, that was a game changer. Instead of fixed leather partitions or custom wooden slots, a bag could hold soft dividers you could move around as your lens set changed.
Jim Domke, a photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, launched the Domke F-2 in 1976. He'd watched colleagues hack fishing bags and military satchels, so he built a bag that accepted that reality. The F-2 had a soft canvas body, minimal rigid padding, movable dividers, and external attachment points for extra pouches. Around the same time, Tenba and later Lowepro pushed the insert concept further with structured padding and zippered compartments. The padded divider became standard.
This was modularity of the interior. You could rearrange the internal walls when you traded a 50mm for a 300mm, or moved from film to early digital bodies. Crucially, the insert wasn't about carrying the same gear in different bags. It was about adapting one bag to changing gear. That's a subtle difference, and it explains why many modern modular systems feel off. They're solving a different problem than the one that made the Domke approach work.
Military webbing walks into a newsroom
In the 1990s, the U.S. military standardized PALS webbing: a grid of one-inch nylon straps sewn at 1.5-inch intervals. Pouches, holsters, radio carriers, and medical kits could be attached and removed from packs, vests, and belts using interlocking straps. The idea was reconfigurability. A soldier could build a loadout for a short patrol one day and a long movement the next without buying a new pack.
Photojournalists paid attention. Think Tank Photo, founded in the early 2000s by photographers with newspaper and wire service backgrounds, built a whole system around modular belts, harnesses, and lens pouches. Instead of one shoulder bag or backpack, you could build a belt system holding two camera bodies, a 70-200mm, a 16-35mm, batteries, a flash, water, and a radio-all distributed around your hips.
This solved a real biomechanical problem. A shoulder bag pulls unevenly on your traps and spine. A well-fitted hip belt transfers much of the load to your pelvis and lets your upper body move. For photographers who crouch, run, and shoot in crowds, a modular belt is not just convenient. It reduces fatigue and keeps your hands free.
I once shadowed a wire service photographer covering urban protests. His kit was a Think Tank belt with two bodies, a 70-200mm in a pouch, a 24-70mm in another, a water bottle, a radio, and a slim pouch for batteries and memory cards. He could swap the long lens pouch for a flash pouch in under a minute depending on whether he was shooting daytime scenes or night demonstrations. The modularity wasn't about storage. It was about workflow. The bag disappeared, and the photographer moved through crowds without thinking.
The best modular belt systems work because they demand active decision-making. You don't just buy one bag and fill it. You build a kit for the day and leave the rest at home. The modularity is a discipline, not a feature.
The ICU era: modularity as a product line
By the late 2000s and 2010s, a new kind of modularity showed up: the Internal Camera Unit, or ICU. F-Stop Mountain, started by outdoor photographers who wanted to carry avalanche gear and camera gear in the same pack, popularized the padded cube that slides into a hiking backpack. Shimoda refined it with core units that have their own frame and access points. Peak Design made camera cubes for their travel packs. Wandrd, Tenba with its BYOB inserts, and a wave of smaller brands followed.
The pitch was tempting. Buy one high-quality travel pack, then buy different camera cubes for different trips. Large cube for a landscape expedition, small cube for a city break, no cube when you want a normal backpack. The outer bag stays the same. The camera insert is modular.
There's real value here. If you already own a hiking pack with a good suspension system, adding a well-designed camera cube can be cheaper and more comfortable than buying a dedicated hiking camera bag with worse straps. Modular cubes also let you fly with a padded camera case you can pull out and carry separately at your destination, leaving the bigger bag in a hotel.
I tested this on a two-week trip through the Dolomites and then Barcelona. In the mountains, I used a 32-liter alpine pack with a medium Shimoda core unit holding a mirrorless body, three lenses, and a filter pouch. In the city, I pulled the core unit out, left the big pack at the rental apartment, and carried the core unit inside a lightweight daypack. That flexibility was genuinely useful. The same padded core protected my gear in two very different contexts, and I only bought one set of dividers.
But the ICU era also turned modularity into a business model. Instead of asking photographers to adapt their bags, manufacturers started selling multiple cubes as a normal part of ownership. The modular insert became its own product line. I've seen the result in workshops and studio visits: closets full of half-used camera cubes, each one living permanently inside a different backpack. The photographer bought the idea of modularity, but in practice each cube became just the divider set for one bag. The swapping never happened, because swapping is friction.
What most modular setups actually cost you
Modular camera bags often solve a logistics problem while creating a photography problem. A modular cube adds an extra layer of fabric, zippers, and handles around your gear. That adds weight and eats usable volume. The outer backpack has its own zippers and closures, and then the cube has another set. To access a camera, you often have to remove the pack, open the main compartment, unzip the cube, and then reach inside. In good light that might cost fifteen seconds. In rain or cold, it can cost you a shot.
I used a 38-liter alpine pack with a medium core unit on a long mountain hike last year. The setup was comfortable on the trail-far better than many camera backpacks at that volume. But changing lenses required taking the pack off, opening two zippered layers, and balancing the pack on a rock. A dedicated hiking camera bag with back-panel access would have been heavier to carry but much faster to work from.
Let me put some numbers on it. I weighed both setups for a one-week landscape trip:
- Modular setup: 38L alpine pack (1.4 kg) + medium ICU (0.9 kg) = 2.3 kg empty.
- Dedicated camera backpack: 36L hiking camera bag with back-panel access = 2.6 kg empty.
The modular setup saved 300 grams. But it added an average of 22 seconds per lens change compared with the dedicated bag. Over a day of moving through changing light, that added up to missing two or three compositions where the light shifted before I was ready. Is 300 grams worth missing a shot? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the trade-off is real, and it's rarely discussed in marketing copy.
The modular setup also wasn't meaningfully lighter once filled. The outer pack plus the camera cube, with all their redundant padding and zippers, weighed within a few hundred grams of a dedicated camera backpack with the same protection. I had purchased flexibility, but on that assignment I wasn't swapping anything. I was just carrying an extra zippered box.
There's also the overpacking problem. A modular pack with lots of attachment points invites more pouches, more straps, more "just in case" additions. Empty MOLLE loops and spare buckles feel like unused potential, so photographers fill them. The result is often a bag that does many things poorly rather than one thing well.
The modular belt systems from the photojournalism era have a different failure mode: balance. Load all your pouches on the right side and the belt torques your pelvis and strains your back. Modularity works best when you actively balance the load, which again requires discipline. I've seen photographers end a day with a sore lower back because they shoved a large lens pouch on one hip and never moved it.
The lesson isn't that modular camera bags are bad. It's that modularity is a tool, not a virtue. It solves a specific problem: the need to reconfigure your carry system for genuinely different types of work. If you don't actually reconfigure your kit, you're carrying the cost of modularity without any of its benefit.
What the next generation should steal from history
If you look at the history, modular camera bags appear in waves whenever camera gear changes shape. The first wave came from large format and military surplus. The second from 35mm systems and Velcro dividers. The third from photojournalists borrowing military webbing. The fourth from mirrorless travel photographers and hybrid shooters who needed a backpack that could be both an office and a camera case.
The next wave, I suspect, will be driven less by new camera formats and more by sustainability and repair. Photographers are frustrated that a broken zipper means throwing away an otherwise functional bag. The right-to-repair movement has pushed electronics and appliances toward replaceable parts, and camera bags are a natural candidate. A padded divider should be replaceable. A hip belt should be replaceable. A harness should be replaceable without sewing. The most useful modularity isn't the ability to swap camera cubes. It's the ability to replace a worn strap or a blown zipper.
Consider this: a typical padded divider in a high-end camera backpack costs a few dollars to manufacture. If a zipper fails, the entire bag-often $300 or more-becomes landfill. That's an absurd failure for a product made from nylon, foam, and plastic. A modular design where the zipper panel attaches with heavy-duty snaps or clips, and can be ordered as a spare part, would extend the bag's life by years.
The future of the modular camera bag shouldn't be more combinations. It should be fewer, better components with open standards. We don't need another proprietary camera cube that only fits one brand's backpack. We need a common attachment grid-essentially PALS webbing, but refined for photo gear-so that pouches, lens cases, battery wallets, and straps can move between brands. That would return modularity to its roots. The original modular photographers didn't want a bag that did everything. They wanted a kit of small, durable, repairable parts that could be assembled for the day and repaired when something failed.
So should you buy modular?
My advice is simple: buy modularity only if you actually work modularly.
- If you're a photojournalist who sometimes carries two bodies and a long lens, sometimes a single body and a flash, and sometimes a water bottle and a radio, a belt-and-pouch system is one of the best investments you can make. It will save your back and speed up access.
- If you're a landscape photographer who needs one backpack to carry a tent, a stove, and a camera system, a hiking pack with a well-built camera cube makes real sense. The cube protects your gear inside a suspension system built for the trail.
- If you're a commercial photographer who works from a studio and occasionally travels, a modular insert inside a roller bag can simplify flights and hotel rooms.
- But if you're a portrait photographer who shoots in the same two locations every week, or a hobbyist who takes one body and two lenses to the same park, a fully modular system is probably just extra weight. A dedicated bag with fast access will be lighter, quicker, and cheaper in the long run.
I've bought bags I thought would make me more flexible, and most of them ended up as single-use backpacks with extra zippers. The best modular camera bag is the one you've stopped thinking about. When the carry system disappears and you're just working, that's the sign the modularity is serving the photography-not the other way around.