How to Zoom in Without Seeing Your Own Face
See if this scenario sounds familiar: you’ve put on your best Zoom shirt for daily work checks, you’ve poured wine for a weekly meeting with friends, you’re ready to engage in some kind of digital face-to-face meeting. connection – but you spend the entire chat session staring at your own face. Luckily, if you want to change that, there are several ways to prevent your face from appearing on your own screen when you zoom.
It’s hard not to spend at least some of the video chat on studying your own appearance. Maybe you want to monitor your facial expression so you don’t look bored or upset; maybe you want to take a quick look at your workspace to make sure it doesn’t look like you just used it as a bedroom. Maybe you are just fascinated by your face and the ability to observe yourself in real time.
To learn more about video conferencing, watch the video below:
If you prefer not to have a Zoom meeting looking at yourself, you may want to be able to communicate more fully with the other participants in the call; or you are distracted by the thumbnail of your video; or, as discussed in a recent Self article, seeing your own face in Zoom affects your mental health – you can remove your image from the screen using one of the following three options, including the one recommended by Zoom:
Option 1. Disable video
The easiest way to scale without looking at your face? Turn off the video before starting the meeting. This option may not work for everyone, and it may not work every time – your friends may be more inclined to talk audio-only than your manager, for example – but if you want a quick fix, turn off your own video. go.
(You can also try turning off the video and setting your name to Reconnect, so it looks like you’re just having trouble getting the video up and running, but a lot of people already know about this hack and it would be pretty awkward to get challenged for that. .)
Option 2. Look into the camera
If you don’t want to look at yourself during Zoom calls, try looking at your webcam instead. Interestingly, this method has a side benefit: By making direct eye contact with your webcam or laptop camera, your eyes will be perfectly positioned to appear as if you were looking into the eyes of everyone else in the Zoom call.
This solution also has a disadvantage: if you look down at your screen for any reason (like looking at a colleague giving a presentation), you still risk seeing your own video and being trapped by your own. appearance. However, focusing on the camera during Zoom calls can help you reduce the amount of time you spend focusing on yourself.
Option 3. Activate the Zoom settings in Hide Myself
Believe it or not, Zoom has already foreseen this problem – and here is their “official” solution :
To hide your video from your own display:
- Start or join a Zoom meeting. The meeting automatically starts in Speaker View and you can watch your own video.
- Right-click the video to display the menu, then select Hide Myself .
When you activate Hide Myself, you can still watch all meeting attendees, and they can still watch you, but you cannot watch you. You get all the benefits of face-to-face video calling without the distraction of your own face. (Want to repair the video? Right-click any custom display and choose Show Myself.)
It’s worth taking the time to learn how to look and sound great in Zoom before you start hitting Hide Myself during every meeting, because once you stop observing yourself, you won’t know if your lights are off ( or your Zoom shirt got a little wrinkled). Once you’ve mastered your Zoom presentation skills, you can start hiding on every call – and not being able to see yourself can make a huge difference in your Zoom meetings.