How to Find Out What App is Using Your Webcam on Windows 10

I will explain a very efficient way to find out which application is using your webcam. Thus, you can prevent its use without your permission, or simply close the application to free up the webcam for use in another application.

For some reason, Windows 10 doesn’t allow you to use your webcam across multiple apps. In most cases, when webcams think that some application is using them, they light up and cannot be used in other applications. So let’s see how we can detect which application is using our webcam and stop it.

How to find your webcam process in an application to stop it

To find our webcam, we need to understand its name in the device manager. From there, we can search in our running processes to find matches with our webcam.

To get started, open the start menu and find D device M anager . Click to open Device Manager when it appears. Find section I Control Devices and click to open the drop-down arrow.

Then right click on your webcam and select “P roperties “. In the new window that appears, press D letters . Then click the Properties drop-down box and search for the physical device object name. Right-click the list that appears and click Copy. You can now close this window.

Now that you have a device name, you can search your running processes to find out which application is using your webcam.

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How to use Process Manager to find which app is using your webcam

For this step, you must download Process Explorer. This program is available here from Microsoft Sysinternals. After downloading the file, unzip the Processexplorer.zip archive file.

Once extracted, navigate to the extracted folder and click to open the procxp.exe file. When prompted, click “Agree”. You should now see a complex process manager similar to what you see in the task manager. Click Find and then Find a Handle or DLL.

Copy the device name into the Designator or DLL Substring field and click Search. It may take some time to fill in the results. You will now see a list of applications that are currently using your webcam.

If you can’t figure out what each of the applications are, click them in the search results page and you will notice that they are greyed out in the main Process Explorer window. If this is an application that you have learned, you can close it and access to the webcam from that application will be stopped.

At this point, you can freely use your webcam in another application without any problem. If you still have problems, it might be a different, unrelated problem. For example, a problem with the software itself. Or perhaps there is an option to change the default webcam in the settings menu of this software.

If you don’t recognize the program in the search results, a quick Google search should yield some accurate results. In some cases, it might just be some kind of software required for your webcam. It is unlikely, but malware could use the webcam.

In this case, you can click on it to highlight it in Process Explorer. Then right-click it in the main window and select End Process. After that, you should follow our guide to check and completely remove malware from your Windows PC

Summary

I hope this guide has helped teach you how to determine which application is using your webcam on Windows 10. By following this guide, you can be sure you won’t run into conflicts with your software and can double check your camera. not used by malware.

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