iPhone: Show clean Camera feed without any on-screen controls

Is there a way to show a clean feed of the Camera on iPhone screen? For example, if I go to the Camera app, I can see the record button, as well as the other controls and options.

I want to see nothing but what the Camera is seeing on the screen of my iPhone. Is this possible?

Solution 1:

This is not possible with the built-in Camera app, or with any other built-in app.

The built-in Camera app doesn't provide options to completely hide the top toolbar and the controls shown at the bottom.

Since this is technically feasible, you may search the App Store for any 3rd-party app(s) which offers the said functionality. For e.g., try searching for minimalistic Camera app on Web/App Store to look for relevant matches.

Solution 2:

After testing and searching paid and free apps for hours. I found a free app that does this. TrueVisage. Tested with iPhone 8, connected to my MacBook with USB-C cable and recording into Quicktime. It has a minimal interface that disappears after a few secs. Leaving beautiful, HQ, controls-free, watermark-free views of front or rear camera. Also has a handy flip function. Winner!

This allows me to use my iphone like an external web camera, connected via USB-C, which looks much better than the icam native to my MacBook Pro.

Note: Notifications from other apps may still come on screen and show in the view. Disable notifications before going live.

Solution 3:

I was having this same issue and didn't find any free, easy solutions so I just created my own:

https://github.com/alexfromapex/camera-viewer

Solution 4:

Yes, here is my paid iOS app that does exactly that, it's called Clean Camera Feed. I'm the creator of this app.

I stream with OBS and found that using other apps available caused a bunch of latency issues and trying to use multiple devices would slow down OBS etc. So decided to write and publish my own app as a solution.

It displays a fullscreen camera view and you can use touch gestures to control the screen (tap to focus, double tap to switch cameras, pinch to zoom, etc.).

Solution 5:

There's a newer app called Camra that works better than the other options listed here. The HTML camera-viewer does not allow camera zoom. True Visage still has some controls, and they take time to disappear.

Camra by contrast only shows controls when taking a photo, and they don't stay up for long. It's perfect if one wants to share an iPhone's video feed using Zoom's built-in feature to broadcast the phone's screen over a cable.