Watchdog

Watchdog watches your own desk through your own Mac's camera. There are three ways to run it: Apple's Vision framework watching for a face, Accelerate comparing frames for movement at a sensitivity you set, or a plain Always-On timer that shoots on an interval anywhere from one second to one hour. Face and motion both wait 3 seconds between triggers, so one person walking past doesn't fill the folder. Resolution and compression are separate controls — 480p through 4K, the camera's native size, or an exact pixel size you type, at whatever JPEG quality you want — because how much detail exists and how cleanly it's stored are different decisions. Captures are written to a folder you pick on this Mac and go nowhere else: the app ships with no network entitlement, so it cannot make an HTTP request even if it wanted to — no account, no analytics, no sync, nothing sent to the developer. Monitoring never starts on its own. You read a first-run recording notice, accept it, and switch monitoring on yourself; launching at login starts the app, not the camera. The menu bar icon is visible the entire time, and macOS lights its green camera indicator whenever the camera is open — Watchdog cannot suppress it and doesn't try. Free keeps captures for 3 days. Watchdog Pro is $3.99/month or $29.99/year, and the annual plan starts with a 7-day free trial.

Works Great With

Deadbolt

Watchdog records who came by; Deadbolt makes sure they couldn't open anything while they were there

Catch

Two menu bar apps that keep a record of what happened while you were away