FixesAudio and camera1 November 2026·3 min read

Why your camera is missing from a Loom recording

Loom grants the camera through Chrome for the extension and through macOS for the desktop app, and the Mac needs three ticks and not one. Where the camera bubble cannot follow you, and the 720p cap Loom documents on camera-only recordings.

Musthaq Ahamad

Building Prequel

Your face was in the preview and it is not in the video. Loom documents three separate reasons for that, and which one applies depends on the recorder you used.

Loom's own pages, read in November 2026, are the source for everything below.

The camera is granted twice, in two places

Loom's two recorders ask two different systems for permission, and a grant to one means nothing to the other.

• Chrome extension. "The extension is granted permissions via Chrome." Loom sends you to the extension's own entry in Chrome's site settings, asks you to set the camera and microphone to Allow, and then to restart Chrome.
• Desktop app. "The desktop app requires permissions granted via your operating system."

On a Mac the desktop app wants three ticks, not one. Loom's instruction is to open Privacy and confirm Loom is checked under "Camera", "Accessibility" and the "Screen recording module". A camera that works in a browser and fails in the app is usually missing the second or the third.

Loom also runs a test page at loom.com/webcam-mic-test to separate a Loom fault from a Mac fault. If the camera fails there too, the problem sits below Loom, and the permission macOS asks for explains what the system is gating.

The bubble cannot follow you everywhere

This part is designed, not broken. On the extension the camera bubble "can't follow you if you switch to a different desktop application or a completely separate Chrome window", and it "can't appear on top of PDFs opened in Chrome". Some sites block it outright: Loom names Facebook and Instagram. Loom's advice in those cases is to use the desktop app.

Adding the bubble part way through a take is possible, with a condition. "You can only switch between screen only and screen and camera while recording", and only if that setting was switched on before you started.

The camera is capped lower than the screen

Camera-only recordings on the Chrome extension are "Limited to 720p", and the Windows desktop app cannot record camera-only above 1080p. A camera that looks soft next to a crisp screen may be doing what Loom documents. Why a Loom recording is not the quality you set covers the screen half of the same question, and if the microphone is what went missing, recording a Loom with the mic off has that. A take that never arrived at all is Loom stuck in processing.

A thread on r/techsupport gathered the desktop app's camera behaviour alongside its other faults, including having to add the camera by hand after the recording had already started.

Read it on r/techsupport

One take, two files

Prequel records the camera to its own file. camera.mp4 sits beside screen.mp4 in the session folder, so the camera is never burned into the picture: you move it, resize it, reshape it and reframe it after the take, and the first pass has already framed it for you. The camera covers the controls, and camera and microphone covers picking the devices.

macOS asks for permission once, and permissions says which ones Prequel needs and why.

Put your face back in the next one.

Prequel needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later. Download Prequel for Mac and try it free for 7 days, with no watermark on anything you export. After that it is $9 a month or $39 once. See what it costs.