Use Your iPhone As a Webcam For Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac. 

Now if you have a MacBook or an iMac you have a built-in webcam and you also may have a display that has a webcam with your Mac Mini or your Mac Studio. But did you know you can also use your iPhone as a webcam. This has a few different advantages. First, the camera's on an iPhone are much higher quality than a standard webcam which has to be really tiny to fit into a display. Look at how thin your MacBook's display, the top is. Compare that to the thickness of an iPhone. That's why the cameras here are so much better. You can use these cameras as a regular webcam usually without too much additional work as long as your iPhone is logged into the same Apple ID as your Mac, they are near each other, and all the standard stuff like BlueTooth is enabled you should see it as an option. 

Another advantage to using your iPhone as a webcam is it is independent of your screen. Your regular webcam is pointing directly at you. You've got to sit right in front of the screen, right in front of your MacBook or your iMac in order to be right in the middle of the camera. But, with an iPhone since it is independent you can point it off at different angles. So if you have to walk around the room a lot of you want to use a whiteboard or something like that while you're in a meeting you have the ability to do that much more easily with an independent camera, like using the iPhone. Various third party companies sell things that will allow you to mount using the Mag Safe Magnet in here to the top of a display. But you can also get tripods, little desktop tripods and things that allow you to easily click your iPhone to it and then you can point it off in a slightly different direction depending upon the situation. You can even sit in a comfortable place in your home or office with your iPhone pointed at you and have your MacBook off to the side while you talk or record yourself. 

But note there are some system requirements. You've got to have iOS 16 or later and macOS Ventura or later. So in other words something that has been updated in the last two years. You also have to have a somewhat recent iPhone, 2018 or later, and also a somewhat recent Mac. But even some of the later Intel Macs should work just fine. There are a lot of other requirements as well. You can check out this page at Apple's Site to  make sure that you've got everything setup right. But as long as you do you should be able to select your iPhone as a camera. 

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Now to use this it is fairly straight forward. Let's start with FaceTime. So in a FaceTime app there's a video menu here. If I click it I should see my camera here as long as everything is setup correctly. So I can just select this instead and now it's going to start using my iPhone's camera, and you can see it changes there. I've got everything  available here that I had before. This really depends on the model Mac you've got and if you're using macOS Sequoia or not. You have all these settings here for things like CenterStage, Portrait Mode, Studio Light, Reactions and whether or not you're using a Background or just showing the entire scene, like that. So you have all those controls if your macOS Sequoia with recent models of everything. Otherwise you just use the camera and there's no special controls for it at all. You can see I can move the camera around pretty easily to be off at different angles and things. 

If you want to record yourself a great app for doing that on your Mac is QuickTime Player. Just run QuickTime Player and go to File New Movie Recording and then here you can also select from here your iPhone Camera as well as any other cameras. Notice that in both FaceTime and QuickTime Pro you can also choose your iPhone's microphone or continue using the microphones you have attached to your Mac. 

PhotoBooth is another app where you can go to a Menu, in this case the Camera Menu, and switch to your iPhone camera and then use this with PhotoBooth for taking pictures or recording. Sadly, however, you can't use iMovie with this. iMovie only works with the FaceTime Camera, say in a MacBook or iMac. It won't work with other cameras and it doesn't support this feature. So if you really want to record yourself and use it in iMovie use QuickTime Player to do that. Save the file and then drag and drop it into iMovie. 

Now for some people the most important app for using this would be Safari or any other web browser. You see web browsers are often the place where people go to to video conference. Sometimes we use independent apps for it but sometimes it is just a video conference that takes place in a web app on a webpage. You can use continuity camera with Safari and other browsers as well. So I'm going to use this test site here and I'm going to select the iPhone camera here, like that. Now you see how I can use it and also the microphone here for web apps like meeting apps. 

You know there's another place where you may use a camera using the special live video feature. So when you add live video you can go to Format, Live Video here. You can go to the cameras and select a new camera and you can choose your iPhone's camera as the source for live video. 

Another place you can use this is if you just want a microphone. If you go into System Settings you can go down to Sound and then click on Input. You should see your iPhone's microphone there. So you can set the microphone to this and then use it in all sorts of apps that record audio. Note that while you usually would use continuity camera with your iPhone just wirelessly, you can connect your camera with a cable. This sometimes is useful for troubleshooting. Sometimes it just doesn't work wirelessly and then you plug in and it works. In those cases if you unplug then usually it  keeps working. But also keeping it plugged in may give you better quality especially if there is a lot of radio interference nearby and plugging in also will keep your iPhone's battery charged. So if you're going to do a hour long online meeting you don't have to worry about running down your iPhone's battery. 

Now note that when you're doing this, this is what it will looks like on your iPhone. It will switch to a screen that looks like this. You can disconnect with that but red button there. There is also a way to Pause. You can simply Pause and you get a freeze frame right there. It's no longer sending a signal but it is easy to just Resume there and then the camera resumes. You don't have to do anything on your Mac to Pause or Resume. You do that on the iPhone.

 But if this isn't working there are a lot of different things that you could check. First on your iPhone go into Settings and check to make sure, of course, you have wi-fi turned on and BlueTooth. Also go into General and in General there is a section for AirPlaying Continuity. There's actually a Continuity Camera switch. So you may have accidentally switched that off in the past. Make sure that is turned On and if it is not working it may not hurt to toggle it Off and then back On again to see if that helps. 

If you're still having trouble you may also want to toggle On and Off BlueTooth on your Mac and you may want to try restarting both devices to see if then it comes up. Also I notice that if you're logged into more than one User Account on your Mac sometimes it will get in each others way. So maybe logout of other User Accounts and only be logged into the one you're using. Also, look at other software that might be running on your Mac that could be using the camera. Special screen recording software maybe you've  installed  or maybe special meeting software that uses the camera. Those could be getting in the way as well. As I've said before, sometimes if it is not working connecting your iPhone with the cable to your Mac sometimes will get it to work and then often once it is working you don't have to keep it plugged in. 

That same page that I showed you before has some troubleshooting tips from Apple as well. If you've checked to make sure that your iPhone and Mac meet the requirements, you've tried my suggestions and you've tried Apple's suggestions and it is still not working, then your next step if your really need this is to contact Apple Support. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.