Take Pictures and Videos With Your Mac Using Photo Booth

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Photo Booth App on your Mac. 

I'm often surprised that people don't know there's an app on their Mac called Photo Booth. It's basically the camera app but for your Mac. It's particularly handy if you've got a MacBook or an iMac that has a built-in camera. But even with a Mac Mini or a MacStudio you can use another camera, like a webcam or even your iPhone, to take advantage of Photo Booth. Basically what it does is it allows you to use your Mac's camera to take a picture or record a video. You don't need to use your iPhone or another camera to take a picture and record and then transfer it to your Mac first. 

The camera on your Mac is really a webcam. So it's not particularly great for high quality stuff. But for taking a quick picture or video it's perfect.

So I'm going to launch it here using Launchpad. You can see it's right there. It actually has been there the whole time. It has been a part of macOS for almost twenty years. So when you launch it it brings up a window like this. It shows the view from your camera. The basic use is this. You can select Camera Mode or Video Mode. Then you can just click right here or press return and it will take a photo or start recording a video. Then it stores the result right here in a little camera roll. So each picture you take will just get added to this. It has its own storage area for pictures so it is not going to put it into your Photos App.

If you switch to Video Mode then when you click here it will start recording a video. You can see the count right here and then you can click Stop and it will stop and place the video there in this little camera roll. You can choose from the Camera Menu which camera you want to use. If you're using an iPhone with Continuity Camera turned On you may see your iPhone here as well and can use your iPhone as a webcam. 

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Now whether you are doing video or taking a photo you can click the Effects Button here and there are three sets of effects. You're going to see them represented here on the screen. So, for instance, you have these kind of camera distortion effects here. You've got these filters here in the second set which might be more useful. You've got an additional set of camera special effects here. Now twenty years ago everybody was very impressed by those. But now a days those are a bit cheesy especially considering some of the more advanced things that you can do with apps on your iPhone..

Now you can review any of the images or videos here by simply selecting them and you can go through them like that. You can export with Control Click or two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on the mouse and choosing Export. You also can see you can delete with the X there or the Context Menu. You can also drag and drop out. So I can drag this out and it's a JPEG image. This and it is a movie file. While you're viewing these you can switch back to the camera by clicking that button right there. You can also select one of these and use the Share Button here and share the photo or video directly to something like Mail or Messages. Or with the photo you can send it to your Photos Library. 

Another thing you can do is you can show a slideshow. So you can select one or more of these and then go to View and Start Slideshow and you get this little slideshow here with some controls at the bottom. Another interesting thing you can do is you can Print and you get this Printing Mode that is not really available in other apps. It's a single photo or a set of photos like this. You can also do a set of photos like that. So the idea is kind of like going into a Photo Booth, taking a photo and then getting a bunch of prints from that of various sizes. 

Now let's go back to the effects for a minute here. So, if I go to effects, the second set of effects might be the most useful. You can do something like the comic look or the black and white, or sepia look that. to create a more interesting video. If you go the Video Mode and you look at the effects and you go to the third set of effects here, like this, a lot of them have a focal point. Like, for instance, the twirl here. So if I click here you can see I can make the twirl bigger or smaller and I can drag the focal point around. One weird interesting thing you can do is you can record and you can move around that focal point while you're recording. 

Another thing to note is that in macOS Sequoia there are a whole bunch of different things you can do with the camera in the Menu Bar here. For instance, depending upon which camera you've got, like a newer MacBook or my Studio Display here, you may have some or all of these. So I can do Centerstage, for instance, and it will work here and actually track my head and try to bring me into the middle, like that. You can also turn on Portrait Mode and you can see how blurred the background of this. You can turn on Studio Lighting. You can use the Reactions, like the thumbs up like this, and you can see how it displays that. You can even turn on Backgrounds here and then select one of these backgrounds, like Color or something from Apple's Library, or something that you maybe imported in yourself. These are all things that work in FaceTime and in other video apps and they will work with Photo Booth as well. 

So you can, for instance, import a completely green background like this and create a green screen and record that in a Photo Booth even if there is not a green screen behind you. 

Another interesting thing you can do is instead of taking a single photo you can take four photos. So let me give that a try. What it is going to do is create a set of four photos like this. So it's actually like stepping into a physical photo booth. You get these four photos. You can export by dragging all four of these out. But you can also click on one of the four and it will zoom in on this. You can actually drag this out and get one of those four as a regular image. 

Notice also there's a countdown and flash when you take a picture. It just uses your screen, goes all white to act kind of as a flash. You can turn that off. If you go to Camera you can Turn Off Screen flash there. You can also turn off the countdown by using the Option Key. So using Option and Return or Option and clicking here and it will just take the photo. You can also use the Shift Key to temporarily disable the flash.

What are the uses for this? Well, if you need a quick photo and you just want to get it right onto your Mac and you're using a MacBook anyway, you can use your MacBook's camera to take a picture of you or something you're holding or something you want to point your MacBook's camera at so for posting something to social media or just a blog or maybe posting something up to a site like eBay or something like that you can very quickly do that using Photo Booth. It's also useful for recording a quick video. You can record a video with just you saying something and then you can very quickly share that to say Mail or Messages. 

You don't really have any export options but remember you can always open up, say, the JPEG image here in Preview. It should be the default app so double clicking that will do it and then you can go in here to File and Export. Then here you can change the quality and the file type. Before you export you can actually go to Tools and Adjust Size and shrink it if you want. The default app for videos is, of course, Quick Time Player. So if double click on one of these videos here you get to Quick Time Player and you have a few export options here. So you can, maybe, make it very small by going to the 480 export option here and I'll just export that really quick. So you can see this original video here was 8.5 MB and then exporting it at 480 brought it down to 2MB. If the point of just a friendly video to be saying hello to somebody that's probably what you want. 

So give Photo Booth on your Mac a look. Play around with it a little bit so you know how to use it in case you need it later. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.