If you want to use your iPhone as a webcam on your Mac, you just have to make sure that your Mac is running macOS 13.0 or later. Let's just cut the long introductions short and get straight to the heart of the matter to teach you how you can use your iPhone as a webcam on your Mac without the need to purchase any additional accessories.
Use your iPhone as a webcam on macOS
As soon as Apple announced macOS Ventura, the company introduced a great feature for all users that allows them to be able to turn their iPhone into a webcam on their macOS computers.
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This feature is the Continuing Camera feature, or it is also known as the “continuity camera”, which works wired or wirelessly with some video services, the most important of which are FaceTime, Zoom, and many other broadcast services.
This feature helps you to use nearby iPhones as a webcam on your Mac and is definitely a great service to avoid the horrible image quality problem you get from the built-in webcam on your portable Mac.
If that's not enough for you, let me tell you what's more important. The Continuity Camera feature allows you to take advantage of a large number of video effects that can be applied during broadcast sessions with a large number of iPhone devices, which can be described as follows:
Continuing Camera features
- Theatrical effect: (Stage center effect is available with iPhone 11 and later.)
- Studio lighting mode: (The Studio Light effect feature is available on iPhone 12 and later.)
- vertical position: (Portrait mode effect is available on iPhone XR and all later.)
- desktop effect: (This feature is available on all iPhone 11 and later versions).
So the big question now is how do you use your iPhone as a webcam on your Mac, or rather how do you mount the phone to the edge of your Mac's lid?
All you need is to buy a stand Belkin iPhone mount which perfectly matches the upper frame of Mac laptops. The price of the holder is $ 29.99 and is currently available on the official Apple store.
The Belkin stand can be relied upon to hold the iPhone in both horizontal and vertical directions, depending on the user's needs. So far this is the only official mount available to take advantage of the 'Continuity Camera' feature.
But if this option is not for you, you will find many cheaper alternatives on the Amazon store, knowing that they are all fake and not original models.
what you need To use your iPhone as a webcam on your Mac
To take advantage of the Continuing Camera feature and operate the iPhone camera on a Mac, you will need both of the following:
- An iPhone running iOS 16 or later.
- A Mac running macOS Ventura or later.
- Belkin iPhone Mount, which costs $30.
- Sign in on both your Mac and iPhone using the same Apple ID account with two-factor authentication enabled.
- Activate both WiFi and Bluetooth on both devices.
How do you use the Continuity Camera feature?
The good news is that the process of using the Continuing Camera feature is very intuitive and does not require any deep experience. All you have to do is attach your iPhone to the frame of your Mac using the Belkin Stand, open the FaceTime app, and instantly your iPhone's camera will be automatically activated.
Then your iPhone will beep and display a pop-up saying Connected which indicates that the iPhone is enabled as a webcam.
But if you want to activate any of the effects that we referred to earlier in this article, just enter the Control Center from the menu bar on your Mac, then click on the Video Effects option, and in this case you can switch between different video modes.
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Center Stage ensures that you stay in frame no matter how hard you try to move around the camera angles. If you try to activate Portrait mode, the background will be blurred slightly to focus on your photo.
The Studio Light effect tries to focus the light exactly on you. As for the “desktop view” effect, it tries to capture what is on the desktop with the help of the Ultra Wide Camera.
Conclusion
This is all you need to know in order to run your iPhone as a webcam on your Mac. This is a great feature for video conferencing, connecting with others, and ensuring you look good, especially since the webcam resolution is so bad.
The only downside is that there aren't a huge number of carrier options officially available, and we don't know if more options will be supported in the future.
