A tiny, privacy-first camera overlay for macOS. Keep your face visible in the corner while recording demos, tutorials, presentations, or screen shares.
Camera Bubble stays above other windows, follows you across Spaces, and includes an independent stopwatch you can start, pause, resume, or reset whenever you want.
- Always-on-top camera preview
- Draggable and resizable floating window
- Mirrored front-camera view
- Manual
Start / Pause / Resumetimer - Timer reset between takes
- Menu-bar controls for the bubble and timer
- A normal Dock icon, Spotlight entry, and Applications/Launchpad presence
- Remembers window size, position, and mirroring
- Native app icon and About panel
- Works across macOS Spaces and full-screen apps
- No account, analytics, networking, or cloud processing
- Native AppKit + AVFoundation with no third-party dependencies
Camera Bubble previews the camera locally with Apple's AVFoundation framework. It does not record, save, transmit, or analyze camera frames. The app has no networking code.
macOS controls camera access. You can revoke it at any time in:
System Settings → Privacy & Security → Camera
- macOS 14 or newer
- A Mac with a camera, or a connected webcam
- Xcode Command Line Tools for building from source
git clone https://github.com/ZenderGoD/camera-bubble.git
cd camera-bubble
./scripts/build.sh
open "build/Camera Bubble.app"The first launch asks for camera permission.
The current GitHub release is ad-hoc signed but not yet Apple-notarized. On the first launch, right-click Camera Bubble.app, choose Open, and confirm. Alternatively, build it locally with the command above.
Do not disable Gatekeeper globally.
- Open Camera Bubble and allow camera access.
- Drag the bubble into a corner of your screen.
- Resize it from any edge.
- Click Start when your demo begins.
- Use Pause/Resume or Reset independently of your screen recorder.
- Use the menu-bar camera icon to hide/show the bubble, control the timer, toggle mirroring, open camera privacy settings, or quit.
Your screen recorder must capture the entire display. If it records only one application window, macOS may omit the floating bubble.
Camera Bubble started as a ten-minute utility built while recording a startup demo. Existing camera-overlay tools were getting in the way, so the smallest useful native alternative was built: camera, timer, drag, resize, done.
Bug reports and focused pull requests are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting a change.
Camera Bubble is available under the MIT License.