how to connect mobile camera to laptop

 

This article is full of practical information to help you get your camera working on your laptop. With these simple instructions, you’ll be able to use your mobile device as a fully functional replacement for a laptop webcam, or even upgrade an older webcam with the flexibility and functionality of newer technologies.

In particular, this blog post will show you how to connect your mobile device through the use of an app that supports it and some specific configuration settings within Windows 10.

Mobile Device Cameras

Mobile device cameras have been getting more and more powerful in recent years. While the sensors aren’t quite as good as DSLRs, they are certainly head and shoulders above what you usually see in laptops. One of the first use cases for this was live streaming video to YouTube or Facebook over an unmetered internet connection to save on your mobile data plan – but these cameras can do a lot more!

By connecting your camera to your laptop, you can use it as a webcam. You will probably want to pair it with OBS (or other streaming software) so that you can live stream from your laptop screen (see our article on how to use OBS).

Image source: https://www.tatacliq.com/

This article isn’t aimed at everyone, but if you have a laptop and know how to use it with a mouse and keyboard, you could get away with this technique. The applications for this aren’t limited to streaming, either. You can pair your camera with an app that allows you to do professional photography such as using it in Photoshop or Lightroom or even using it as a webcam at events such as events like conferences where live video is required.

Conversion tool

The next step is to connect your camera up to your laptop so that its supported by the operating system of your laptop (I assume here that you are running Windows 10). This takes two parts:

Preparing your phone or camera to be accessed as a webcam via USB/Lightning/micro-USB/etc. Using an app on your phone that supports video streaming (most do!) and configuring Windows 10 to access it.

Image source: https://paytmmall.com/

This can be a little tricky, so I’ve run a tool that will both prepare the device and install software so that you don’t have to figure out how to do it yourself! The download is here: Windows_Camera_Maker.exe (1.49MB). It’s a .NET 4.0 application, but you can run it on any processor architecture (it uses the .NET Framework from the Microsoft Dependency Walker). Please read all of the following instructions before running the program. If there is anything you don’t understand, please let me know in the comments!

Motivation and Disclaimers

I wrote this program to help me do some projects that I was working on. This solution was chosen because it allowed me to use an existing Android app that supported video streaming without needing to build my own app or modify one of the Android camera drivers (both of which sounded like a lot of hard work!).

This program uses some software that may be outside of its intended use, so it has been written with the following disclaimers:

THIS SOFTWARE MAY DAMAGE YOUR CAMERA. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT THIS SOFTWARE CAUSES TO YOUR CAMERA. YOU CAN EITHER RUN THIS PROGRAM AT YOUR OWN RISK OR DON’T RUN IT AT ALL AND WAIT FOR A BETTER SOLUTION.