Camera On Macbook Pro 2017

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The built-in camera on your MacBook Pro is really useful for a variety of reasons.

If you want to use popular apps like FaceTime and Skype, you'll be using your camera pretty often. The cameras on MacBooks are pretty high-quality and functional but are more designed for video streaming and video chats than for real photography.

Regardless of how you want to use your camera, you need to know how to turn it on and off. We talked about how to turn your camera on in another post so for this one, we will look at how to turn the camera off. This is another easy task but is good to learn so you know your camera is not turned on at times when you don't want it to be.

Use the built-in camera on Mac. Many Mac computers and displays have a built-in FaceTime or FaceTime HD camera located near the top edge of the screen. The camera automatically turns on when you open an app—such as FaceTime, Messages, or Photo Booth—or use a feature—such as Markup or head pointer—that can use the camera. How to sign out of email on macbook. Check for applications using the camera. Typically, only a single Mac app can utilize the camera at a.

Why Turn Your Camera Off

There are a few obvious reasons to turn your camera off and there are also a few reasons you might not have thought of. Since it is so easy to do, turning off your camera after you use it is a simple habit to get into when operating your MacBook Pro.

Sometimes, you might want to double-check that your camera is off but once you know the steps, it takes no time at all.

1. Privacy

Privacy is a big issue in today's world of technology.

Having access to so much information at the click of a button is an amazing aspect of the modern world but it also comes with potential privacy risks. The idea of someone accessing your camera without you knowing is pretty terrifying and something nobody wants. It's not likely but it is possible that this could happen to you.

Hackers can potentially access your camera and spy on you if it's not turned off or disabled and there is also a chance that if you accidentally leave your camera on, anybody you were chatting with could see video of you when you aren't expecting it. These are both instances that violate privacy that are fixed when your camera is turned off.

2. Save Battery

The camera is an awesome feature of your MacBook Pro but it does eat up more power than other uses of your computer.

This display on your MacBook is one of the most power-hungry elements and you use your display constantly when you are using your camera. Video calls or live-streaming can quickly go through your battery if you are not plugged into a power source.

In order to avoid unnecessary power use, there are a variety of things you can do but making sure your camera is off is an important one. You can definitely use your camera when you are running on battery power if you need or want to but you will want to make sure it is turned off completely afterwards.

Read more: How to save Mac battery

3. Save Space

Another reason to turn your camera off is simply to save space. If you accidentally leave your camera on and it starts to take pictures or videos without you knowing, it can quickly eat up lots of space on your hard drive. Images and videos can use up a lot of memory and storage, so it's good to know that you aren't adding extra files unknowingly. Unwanted files are easy to delete but they are also easy to prevent in the first place.

How To Turn Off Camera

Now that you know the reasons for turning off your camera, let's take a look at how to actually do it.

One of the easiest ways to turn off the camera on your MacBook Pro is to simply close the app you are using that uses the camera. When you open up one of these apps to turn the camera on, a little green light appears to the right of the camera lens. When you close these apps, the little green light should disappear indicating that the camera is now turned off. Sometimes you might need to hit Command Q instead of just closing the tab to fully quit an application.

If you are really concerned about privacy you might want to take further steps to prevent your camera from turning on without you knowing. One of the easiest ways to do this is to simply cover your camera lens with a piece of dark tape.
This may sound weird but if anyone tries to access your camera, even if they succeed, they won't be able to see anything if the camera lens is covered up.

A real hacker could access your camera without the green light turning on so this might be a good idea if you are really worried about your personal security and privacy. It's an easy measure to prevent your camera from recording anything at all.

Additionally, there is not a current method to disabling your Mac's camera through the standard programs and functions included on the machine. You will need to download a 3rd party app to really disable your camera. One app that works well for this is called iSight Disabler and this program will turn off your camera completely so you don't have to worry about it turning on without you knowing it. You can see this CNET article for more.

Also Read: How to Turn On Camera on MacBook Pro

Final Thoughts

Turning off your built-in MacBook Camera is really easy.

There are a few different ways to go about this task and depending on how thorough you want to be or how much of concern privacy is, you can decide which option is best for you.

Best free montage editing software. Do you put tape over your MacBook's camera?

Last week, I forgot my bag in a G7 Taxi in Paris. Inside was the MacBook Pro I'm using every day. This day was probably not a good day.

The problem with losing your computer in a Taxi in Paris is that you can't contact the driver like you would do with an Uber. If you don't remember the Taxi numberplate, you have no chance to see the driver again. The only chance you have to get your bag back is to go to the 'Lost and Found' Police department of Paris, and hope the driver has been honest.

I miss you, Macbook Pro!

As the driver won't drop my bag immediately, I decided to wait one week before considering my bag as completely lost. What can I do during one week without any computers at home?Wait… that's not true, I have a computer at home! What about using my Raspberry Pi 3?

The Raspberry Pi is clearly a good idea: It's powerful, it runs Linux, it's silent. Let's go for one week on this!

The Raspberry Pi 3

Softwares I was using on my Mac

I'm software engineer, and use this personal Mac for lots of stuff:

  • Coding on the opens-source project Gladys I founded. Gladys is a home assistant based on a Raspberry Pi (like a kind of Jarvis), written in Node.js so it's basically some Node.js development. For this I'm using VS Code + Node.js + MySQL.
  • Writing on Gladys blog. I'm writing my articles in Markdown using Macdown on my Mac. I'm editing images with Photoshop.
  • Answering messages on Gladys community (it's basically a Discourse forum)
  • Video editing on Final Cut Pro (outch, this is going to be hard to replace)
  • Web browsing (News reading, YouTube, Twitter)
  • Terminal, mostly for dev tools & SSH (that's where I spend most of my day, and should be the easiest thing to replace)

Setting up the Raspberry Pi

For those who don't know the Raspberry Pi, it's a tiny Linux computer powered by a quad core ARM CPU and 1Gb of RAM. It's used in a lot of DIY project, because it only costs 35$ on average.

I have severals of them at home for my Home Automation project Gladys, so I took one to convert it into a full Desktop PC.

First step was to download Raspbian Jessie. I used my parents computer, and cloned the image on a 16Gb micro-SD card.

I plugged an old Wireless Mouse, a really old USB keyboard, a 22' HDMI screen into the Raspberry Pi, and turned everything on.

The first good impression when turning the Pi on is the noise: The Raspberry Pi doesn't have any fans, so it's perfectly silent. My Mac was quite silent too, but not that silent.

Working on the Raspberry Pi

Web browsing

Camera On Macbook Pro 2017

Raspbian Jessie has Chromium included. I decided to go with it, and the result is quite good. Browsing is nearly as fast as on a classical computer, and as it's Chromium, Javascript is perfectly executed. The only problem is that each tab in Chromium is a separate process. Each chromium process takes 150/200Mb of RAM, and since the Raspberry Pi has 1Gb of RAM, having 3/4 tabs opened is really the limit before having a laggy system. And don't ever try to swap on the SD card, it's really slow!

Ok, so lesson learned: Only keep 3 tabs opens. I just need to forget about 'right-click' -> 'Open in a new tab', and I'll be good.

Writing

As a power-user of Evernote, I decided to try the Evernote web app inside Chromium. And it works great! This article is currently written inside Evernote for web, and it's almost as good as the mac app.

I haven't found any great Markdown writing app available on Linux and compiled for ARM, so I'll just copy paste the note content inside the default text-editor, add markups, and git push the article to my github page repository to publish it.

Development

Camera On Macbook Pro 2017

To develop, I'm using VS Code, and spend most of my remaining time in the terminal.

For the terminal, the Raspberry Pi is just perfect. Nothing change, I'm at home. Macbook can t find disk.

For VS Code, whereas it's possible to compile it on ARM, I was more skeptical. VS Code is an electron based app, so it starts a full instance of Chromium. It may be too heavy to run it next to Chromium.

I decided to use vim with the Javascript plugin.

The coding process itself is quite good. The only problem is that most tools you use on your dev machine are really slow on a Rasperry Pi. Webpack, uglifyJS, Babel: My good old Mac was really better at this.

Image editing

I forgot about Photoshop, and first tried Canva on the web. It was way too slow to really use it. And since I'm taking my pictures with my camera/phone, and usually transfer them using the SD port of the Mac, the best solution I found was connecting my camera using Wi-Fi to my iPhone.

Then, using the Canon app, I downloaded the pictures I wanted, edited the picture inside Canva iOS app, and uploaded the images to Google Drive. Not the most efficient, but it works!

Then, to resize the image so it's not too heavy in an article, I simply used an online resizer.

Note: Google Drive was really hard to use on the Raspberry Pi.

Video editing

Let's just forgot this part :DI won't edit any videos this week.If I needed to, I would have used the iOS iMovie app. Since my Mac was already struggling with video editing, the Raspberry Pi would have died.

In closing

I've been using the Raspberry Pi since the first model as a home automation server, but I've never really used the desktop version in the past.

And I was impressed by the speed and usability of the Raspberry Pi 3 in desktop mode. It's definitely not a tool for compiling heavy software or rendering 4K videos, but for basic blogging, browsing and simple development, it just works.

For the price it costs, you definitely have a nice machine.

I really hope I'll get my mac back, (finger crossed) but this was a good opportunity to test the Raspberry Pi in Desktop mode!

PS: For all users on Gladys, sorry for not being that present last week, it was not an easy week. Without my Mac, it was hard to publish big changes on the project, especially on the video pack I'm working on. But I'll be back soon!

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Camera On Macbook Pro 2017

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