remote-camera

Control an iPhone's camera from a Mac: see a live preview with sound, take photos and record videos. Everything is saved to the iPhone's Photos library.

One SwiftUI codebase and one Xcode target build both apps. #if os(iOS) in RemoteCamera/App/RemoteCameraApp.swift makes the iPhone build the camera and the Mac build the remote.

Build

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml by XcodeGen and is not checked in. Everything goes through the Makefile:

make mac_run      # build and launch the Mac app
make mac_install  # an optimised build into /Applications as "Remote Camera", then launch it
make ios_device   # build, install and launch on the connected iPhone
make ios_run      # the iPhone app in the Simulator (streams a test pattern: there is no camera)
make build        # compile both

See the top of the Makefile for the rest and for the knobs (CONFIGURATION, DEVICE, TEAM, …).

Use

1. Open Remote Camera on the iPhone and leave it in the foreground. iOS stops the camera of an app in the background.
2. Open it on the Mac, on the same Wi-Fi (or close by: peer-to-peer Wi-Fi works too), and pick the iPhone on the left.
3. The first time, the iPhone asks whether to allow that Mac. After that it reconnects on its own.

Space is the shutter. In Video mode it starts and stops recording.

The sidebar picks the camera (back or front), the zoom and the video resolution (1080p or 4K). Zoom works as in the Camera app: one continuous range, 0.5× to 25× on a 16 Pro, with a button for each lens (0.5×, 1×, 5×) and a slider and stepper for anything in between, in tenths. The iPhone moves between lenses as the zoom crosses them and zooms digitally in between, so 1.2× is the main lens. Zoom can change while recording; the camera and resolution cannot.

Mirror flips the picture left to right, and what you see is what is saved: the preview on the Mac and on the iPhone, and the photos and videos in Photos. Each camera remembers its own setting; the front one starts mirrored, like a selfie view. The flip and the rotation are made in the pixels rather than recorded as metadata, which some players and sites ignore.

In Video mode, Background Blur turns on Cinematic mode and sets its simulated f-number: lower blurs the background more. It is the Camera app's Cinematic effect (iOS 26, iPhone 13 or later), visible in the Mac's preview and recorded into the video. The physical aperture of an iPhone lens is fixed; there is nothing to set for photos.

iOS will not blur more than Cinematic mode's lowest f-number, so People + adds more on top: Vision finds the people in each frame and the rest is blurred as hard as the slider says (iOS/BackgroundBlur.swift). It works on people only, with or without Cinematic mode, in Video mode, and it can change while recording.

Every photo and video is also copied to the Mac as soon as it is taken, into ~/Pictures/Remote Camera, and shows up under the preview. Click one to look at it (videos play), right-click to open it or show it in Finder, or drag it into another app. Shots taken while no Mac is connected wait on the iPhone and follow when one connects.

How it works

• The iPhone advertises _remotecam._tcp over Bonjour; the Mac browses for it and connects over TCP (Shared/PeerConnection.swift).
• Frames are length-prefixed. Control messages are JSON; the preview is ~15 fps of 960 px JPEGs, and the microphone is 16-bit mono PCM (Shared/Wire.swift). Media that the network cannot keep up with is dropped rather than queued, so the preview stays live.
• Photos come from AVCapturePhotoOutput. Videos are written with AVAssetWriter from the same sample buffers that feed the preview (iOS/CameraService.swift, iOS/MovieRecorder.swift).
• Each shot is saved to Photos and put in an outbox on the iPhone (iOS/Outbox.swift), which sends it to the Mac in 256 KB chunks over the same connection, a few at a time so the preview keeps flowing. The Mac files it (macOS/CaptureReceiver.swift) and confirms; only then does the iPhone delete its copy. Undelivered files over 2 GB are dropped, oldest first.

The link is not encrypted, and the iPhone recognises an allowed Mac by an ID the Mac sends in the clear. That is fine on a home network; on a network you do not trust, someone could watch the preview or pose as your Mac.