A USB webcam keeps your settings only while it stays powered and connected. Unplug it, sleep the Mac, or switch a hub, and it comes back at the factory defaults — because macOS keeps no record of what you changed and never puts it back. Calling apps add a second reset of their own by turning the automatics on when they open the camera.
That is the whole mechanism. Everything below is the detail, and what actually stops it.
The camera has no memory, and neither does macOS
Exposure, white balance, focus, zoom and the rest live in registers on the camera itself. Setting one means sending it a USB Video Class control request; the camera holds the value in volatile memory and applies it to the sensor. When the device loses power or is re-enumerated by the operating system, those registers go back to their power-on defaults. Very few consumer webcams save anything to flash.
The other half is the Mac. macOS has no system preference for webcam controls, no per-camera store, and no mechanism that reapplies anything on reconnect. It genuinely does not know that you spent ten minutes on your exposure. As one reviewer put it, in the tone everyone eventually reaches:
Apple should provide a system preference for webcams IMHO.
— a 2021 App Store review of a webcam utility
So the camera forgets, and nothing remembers on its behalf. The settings are gone in the ordinary sense of gone.
Three moments where it happens
A reconnect. The obvious one: pulling the cable, a hub that renegotiates, a monitor with a built-in hub that drops its downstream ports when it changes input. To macOS this is a new device arriving, and a new device arrives at its defaults.
Sleep and wake. Some Macs and many hubs cut power to USB peripherals on sleep, which is functionally the same as an unplug. You close the lid with your camera dialled in and open it to the factory picture.
An app opening the camera. This one surprises people, because nothing was disconnected. Opening a camera is the moment an app gets to configure it, and a great many calling apps ask for automatic exposure and automatic white balance as a matter of course. The camera does what it is told. Your manual values are not “lost” so much as overwritten by whatever the automatics settle on.
But once I get into a Zoom call, the settings quickly revert to the defaults.
— a 2021 App Store review of a webcam utility
During meetings, the field of view and zoom settings reset to their default values mid-call, without any input from me.
— a 2025 thread in Zoom’s community forum, on macOS 15.7
The mid-call version is the same thing arriving late: an automatic mode that was switched back on is still running, still deciding, and it changes its mind when someone walks past your window.
Why the usual fixes don’t work
Relaunching the vendor app. It reapplies the settings for as long as nothing else touches them — which is until your next call, or your next sleep. It is a manual step you now perform several times a day.
A different cable or a powered hub. Worth doing if your camera actually drops off the bus, and it will reduce how often you hit the reconnect case. It does nothing about apps turning the automatics back on.
Looking for a driver. There is no webcam driver to install on macOS. USB webcams speak a standard the system already implements, which is exactly why any of them work at all on a Mac without software. What people mean when they search for a “webcam driver” is a control panel — an app that sends the settings. That app exists; a driver does not.
Turning everything to manual and hoping. Manual is the right answer, but manual values live in the same volatile registers as everything else. Manual does not mean permanent.
What actually fixes it
Nothing can make the camera remember. So the fix has to be something on the Mac that notices the camera came back and sets it again — automatically, without you.
That is what CamDial does. You set exposure, white balance, focus and zoom once, save them as a preset, and the app watches for the camera. When it reconnects, the preset goes back on and you get a quiet notification saying so, with an undo in case it guessed wrong. For the app-opens-the-camera case, a per-app rule reads as a sentence — when Zoom comes to the front, apply Evening warm — and fires at the moment the automatics would otherwise take over.
There is also the stubborn version of that case, where an app keeps adjusting the picture after the call has started. For that there is a Pro toggle, Hold these settings against other apps: while it is on, CamDial checks the camera twice a second and puts your values back. It stays off unless you ask for it, because holding means reading the camera continuously — this is the one thing in the app that runs on a timer, and it should be your decision rather than a default.
Two things are worth saying plainly. CamDial changes the camera itself over USB rather than filtering the video, so the corrected picture shows up in every app without you selecting a virtual camera anywhere. And it shows values in real units — 1/250 s, 4600 K — because a setting you can write down is a setting you can get back.
The case where none of this helps
If the camera you are fighting is the one built into your Mac or your Studio Display, stop looking. Apple’s built-in cameras do not expose hardware controls to any application on macOS. No app can set their exposure, and no app can restore it, because there was never anything to set. This is a limitation of the system, not a gap in anyone’s product — and if you came here for that, better to know now.
For everything with a USB plug on the end, the settings can be made to stick. They just need something to put them back. If your camera is a Logitech and you came here from a dead download page, the Camera Settings replacement guide covers that specific mess.