Owl Cam turns a Mac and any webcam or iPhone into a camera that records only when something happens — and keeps recording as long as someone is in the room. The video stays on the Mac.
You want to know whether anyone came near your desk while you were gone — and see it, rather than wonder.
Point it at the front door, the cot, the workshop. It costs nothing to try and it was going to sit in a drawer anyway.
An iMac already faces the room. An iPhone on a stand adds the second angle, without a subscription or a new box on the wall.
Sit still for ten seconds and the clip ends. Move again and a new one starts. An evening at the desk becomes forty fragments, and the moment you actually want is split across two of them.
One person, one hour at a desk. Three of the clips are under five seconds. Finding the moment means opening all of them.
The same hour, one file, starting three seconds before the first movement and ending when the room is genuinely empty again.
Owl Cam keeps a frozen picture of the empty room and compares every frame against it — so a person who stops moving is still obviously there.
Movement → record. Frame-to-frame change. Fast, immune to a light being switched on. It can only start a clip, never end one.
Something present → record. Difference from the empty scene. Stays high while anything new is in the room — a person, an animal, a parcel — even if it holds still.
Below this → stop. The clip ends only after the reading falls under the line and stays there. And never while Apple's on-device Vision still recognises a person.
Every number above is yours to move, and the charts update as you drag. There is nothing hidden behind an "AI sensitivity" slider.
This is the whole reason the app exists on your machine instead of in someone's cloud. It is also the one claim you should not take on faith — so here is how to check it yourself.
Plain .mp4 files you can open in QuickTime, move, or delete. No database, no proprietary container, no vendor lock-in.
Motion analysis and Apple's Vision person detection run locally, on frames that are never written anywhere but your recordings.
The single outbound call is validating a Pro licence key. No account, no sign-up, no analytics, no crash reporting. The free version never calls out at all.
# Confirm the app is signed and notarized by Apple codesign -dvv /Applications/Owl\ Cam.app spctl -a -vv -t install /Applications/Owl\ Cam.app # Then watch it: with a network monitor such as LuLu or Little Snitch, # the free version makes no outbound connection at all.
A rolling buffer puts the first seconds of every event into the file, instead of losing them while the detector made up its mind.
Days with people in them are marked. Drag a span on the timeline to get thumbnails; click one to play from that second.
Any camera macOS can see, Continuity Camera included. Each one detects and records independently, into its own folder.
Each frame carries the moment it was actually captured — pre-roll included — in the position, size and format you choose.
Cap by size or by free space. Delete oldest, smallest, or clips without people first — and keep anything recent, large or marked.
Copies finished clips off the Mac and verifies them byte for byte. If the NAS is asleep, the USB drive takes over and the NAS catches up later.
Copy a clip only if it matches: two people at once, longer than five minutes, over 60 MB, at night, from that one camera.
The app checks once a day and offers the new version in place. Each update is notarized by Apple and signed with Owl Cam's own key — it installs only if both check out.
Pause by weekday and time window. A recording in progress is never cut short; it simply won't start a new one.
Better to read this now than to find out after paying.
A local app has no servers to pay for every month, so it doesn't ask you to. Buy it once, keep it.
14-day full trial on first launch, no account. 14-day refund, no questions. VAT handled by Polar.
No. Detection, recording and review are local, and recordings are plain files in a folder you picked. The only outbound request in the whole app is validating a Pro key — the free version makes none. Backups go wherever you point them, including a drive with no internet at all.
That is the one thing it is built not to do. The scene reading stays high while you are in the room, and Vision vetoes every stop while it recognises a person. The only exit is a hard cap you set yourself: fully still for N seconds with nobody recognised.
Yes. Every build is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it normally — no right-click workaround, and no repeated camera-permission prompts after an update.
Owl Cam checks for a new version once a day and tells you inside the app; one click downloads and installs it, and the app comes back running. Nothing is sent with the check. You can turn the automatic check off in Settings → General and update whenever you like instead.
Anything macOS exposes as a camera: USB webcams (developed against the Insta360 Link 2C), the built-in camera, and an iPhone over Continuity Camera. Each camera runs its own detection and writes to its own folder.
You choose the quality; the settings show the resulting bitrate and an estimate per hour. Then set a storage budget and Owl Cam holds itself to it, deleting by rules you pick rather than filling the disk.
The 14-day trial is the whole app, no account and no card. If you buy and it's not right, email within 14 days and Polar refunds it.
One camera is free for as long as you want it. Nothing to sign up for.
Notarized by Apple · macOS 14 or later · Universal (Apple Silicon & Intel) · release notes