Best Places to Mount Security Cameras Around Your Home

The best places to mount security cameras around your home are the spots where an intruder's path is forced through a fixed point. Every property has chokepoints — the front door, the side gate, the garage threshold — and a camera watching a chokepoint beats a camera watching open yard. This guide walks the outside of an average home and shows where each camera belongs, at what angle, and what goes wrong when placement is guessed instead of planned.

Map the routes before you mount anything

Walk the property as if you had to break in. Many intruders prefer side gates, garage entries, or back doors because they sit hidden from the street. Note where each route meets a wall, a fence corner, or a narrow path — those junctions are your mount points. A camera covers a wedge of space, not a radius, so a corner mount watching two directions at once can be worth two cameras aimed at open space.

Front door: the angle that actually identifies faces

The front door gets the most traffic, so mount high enough to capture faces, not hats. Roughly 8 to 10 feet, tilted slightly down, under the eaves where one exists. That height keeps the camera out of arm's reach and puts arriving faces near the centre of the frame, where detail is sharpest. A doorbell camera covers the approach; a second camera on the side wall covers the blind spot beside the door frame, where someone can linger outside the doorbell's view.

Height and tilt: the two numbers that matter

Wide-angle lenses soften detail toward the edges of the frame, so a face at the outer edge identifies worse than one in the middle. Tilting the camera down a few degrees pulls the doorway's centre into that sharp middle zone. And never point straight into the setting sun — a west-facing lens at dusk records silhouettes, not faces.

Garage, side gate, and back door: the quiet entries

Side and rear entries attract more attempts than the front door precisely because neighbours and the street cannot see them. Mount at the corner where two walls meet so one camera watches both the gate and the path beside it. If the garage has a manual door, cover the handle side: a camera mounted over the opposite corner records anyone reaching for the release. Keep the lens clear of bushes — overgrowth both hides an approach and fires false motion alerts all night.

Driveway: where to point so plates read

Licence plates read when a car is close, not when it sits at the street. Mount high on the house or garage wall facing down the drive so vehicles pass within a few metres of the lens. Resolution thins with distance: a wide-angle camera at the far end of a long drive records a blur where a plate should be. Cover the near stretch well rather than the far stretch badly, and if the street corner also needs a camera, check garage and driveway camera options first.

Windows and glass: why night vision fails there

Never mount a camera behind a window at night. Infrared light bounces off the glass and floods the sensor, turning the picture into a white smear. If the room beyond the glass needs coverage, mount the camera outside it — under the eave or on the exterior frame — instead of behind the pane. The same reflection problem applies to sliding patio doors, so treat them as exterior mounts, not interior ones.

Patio, yard, and fence line

Outdoor coverage is about paths, not acres. Aim the camera along the fence line or walkway so movement crosses the frame, which is what motion detection handles best. Set activity zones to ignore the street and mature trees, or every passing car and swaying branch becomes an alert. Under-eave mounting also keeps rain off the lens and out of the housing. If discretion matters more than deterrence, see spots that hide a camera instead.

Spots that create legal risk

Placement has a legal edge. Do not point cameras into a neighbour's bedroom, bathroom, or private yard, and keep lenses away from shared spaces in multi-unit buildings. Where you may aim a camera, whether audio counts as recording, and what consent is required all vary by state and municipality — check your own jurisdiction before finalising any outdoor mount. A camera aimed at a neighbour's window can become a complaint, or worse, even when the footage itself is never used.

A five-minute walk-around checklist

Start at the front door: face-height angle, slight down-tilt, side-wall blind spot covered.
Walk each quiet entry — side gate, garage, back door — and mount at corners.
Aim driveway coverage at the near stretch, not the street.
Move any camera sitting behind glass to the exterior.
Point yard cameras along paths and set zones to ignore trees and street.
Check every lens against neighbours' private spaces and your local recording laws.