How to View an IP Camera on iPhone

Before you start

• Check the camera can be viewed by other apps. It needs RTSP or ONVIF. Most Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, Amcrest, Tapo, Axis and UniFi cameras qualify; Ring, Nest, Arlo and Blink do not.
• Know the camera's own login. That is the username and password stored on the camera, usually admin and the password you set during setup, not the email address of a cloud account. Tapo is the exception: it wants a separate Camera Account.
• Finish setup in the manufacturer's app first. New cameras have to be activated, given a password and joined to Wi-Fi before any other app can see them.

Step by step

1. Connect the iPhone to the same Wi-Fi network as the camera — not a guest network.
2. Install IP Camera Viewer & Monitor and tap Allow when iOS asks to find devices on your local network.
3. Tap Scan. ONVIF cameras and recorders on your network appear in the list; pick yours and enter its username and password.
4. If it is not listed, add it manually: enter its IP address, choose the brand preset if there is one, or tap Find Stream Path to try the common paths.
5. If that fails too, paste the camera's full RTSP address from its manual or from the brand guides on this site.
6. Open the camera to watch it live, and switch between main and sub-stream from the Streams menu if the camera offers both.
7. With Pro, add your other cameras and put them in a group to watch two, four, six or nine at once.

The free version plays one camera. Adding more, groups, snapshots, recording and PTZ control come with Pro.

Finding the camera's IP address

If scanning does not find the camera, you need its address. Three places to look:

• Your router's list of connected devices. Cameras often show up under their brand name or the first part of their MAC address.
• The manufacturer's app. Device information or network settings usually show the IP address.
• The manufacturer's discovery tool on a computer, such as Hikvision SADP or Dahua ConfigTool, which also shows cameras that have not been activated yet.

Then reserve that address in the router's DHCP settings. Otherwise the camera may get a new address after a power cut and the app will report it as unreachable.

Watching away from home

IP Camera Viewer connects straight to the address saved for each camera; there is no cloud relay in between. On mobile data without a VPN, a camera with a home address such as 192.168.1.64 cannot be reached, so the app shows Waiting for Home Wi-Fi instead of retrying in the background.

To watch from anywhere, connect the iPhone to your home network with a VPN, then open the app: the camera plays as it does at home. Common ways to get one:

• The VPN server built into many routers and gateways (WireGuard or OpenVPN).
• A mesh VPN such as Tailscale on an always-on computer or NAS, set up as a subnet router for your home network.

Privacy VPN apps such as NordVPN or ExpressVPN don't work for this, because they can't reach your home network. The guide to viewing your cameras away from home covers router VPNs and Tailscale step by step, and what to check when the VPN is on but cameras don't load.

Avoid forwarding the camera's ports to the internet. It works, but it leaves the camera's login page open to anyone who scans for it. Over mobile data, use the sub-stream: the main stream of a 4K camera can use several gigabytes an hour.

If the camera will not play

Work through these in order: Local Network access allowed; iPhone on the same network as the camera; correct IP address; the camera's own login rather than a cloud account; RTSP or ONVIF switched on in the camera (Reolink and Tapo ship with them off). The RTSP guide explains each error message the app can show.