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The direct answer: cover the entries first, at seven to nine feet, angled down about ten to fifteen degrees, aimed so faces walk into the frame rather than under it. In priority order that is the front door, the driveway or street approach, the main back door, the garage, and any ground-floor window hidden from the street. Everything else is secondary. Position matters more than the camera itself — a mid-priced camera in the right spot beats a flagship at gutter height, and owners consistently report that placement is what decided whether their footage was usable.
The reason placement outranks specifications is simple: roughly two-thirds of residential intrusions come through a door, and the overwhelming majority of the incidents homeowners actually experience — package theft, vehicle break-ins, vandalism, a delivery dispute — happen within twenty feet of an entry point or a parked car. A camera covering an empty side lawn is a camera covering nothing. To be clear about where this comes from: we do not buy or physically handle these cameras, so everything below is drawn from expert consensus on residential coverage and from the patterns that repeat across thousands of owner reviews describing what their footage did and did not capture.
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The Positions, In Order of Value
1. The front door. This is the first camera on almost every property, and the consensus favors it strongly. It covers deliveries, visitors, the most common approach, and the single most likely point of forced entry. A video doorbell handles this position well because its tall vertical frame fits a face and a parcel on the mat in the same shot — see video doorbells and the position-specific ranking in best security camera for front door. If the porch is deep or the door is set back, a doorbell alone will miss the approach; pair it with a wall camera aimed down the path.
2. The driveway or street approach. Second most valuable, and the position most often set up badly. The useful target is the area where a vehicle stops and a person gets out, not the road itself. Aim across the driveway rather than straight down it, because a camera pointed at the street will alert on every passing car and get muted within a month. If you want a license plate readable, the camera needs to be close and roughly perpendicular; a plate at forty feet on a wide lens is a gray smear on any resolution.
3. The main back door or rear slider. Rear entries are less overlooked than the front and therefore more attractive, and they are usually darker. This is the position where added light pays for itself, which is why floodlight cameras are the common recommendation here.
4. The garage. Two positions really: the exterior approach and the interior. Garages hold tools, bikes and a second vehicle, and an open garage door is one of the most frequently reported opportunistic entry points. An interior camera aimed at the door line covers both the contents and the connecting door into the house.
5. Ground-floor windows out of public view. Any first-floor window screened from the street by a fence, hedge or side return is a soft spot, because it offers privacy to anyone working on it. One camera can often cover a whole side return if it is mounted at the corner looking along the wall rather than across it.
6. Interior choke points. If you want indoor coverage, the highest-value spot is the hallway or stair landing that everything must pass through, not the middle of the living room. One camera on a choke point sees more of what matters than three cameras in individual rooms. See indoor cameras, and pan-tilt cameras if you want one unit to sweep an open-plan space.
Height, Angle and Distance
Seven to nine feet is the range that works for nearly every outdoor position, and it is worth understanding why both ends of the range matter. Under seven feet, the camera is reachable — a hand, a hat, a can of spray paint. Over ten feet, geometry works against you: the steeper the down angle, the more of the frame is the crown of a head and the less is a face. Owners who mounted under a second-floor soffit because it was the convenient fixing point report exactly this outcome, with a clean, wide, unhelpful picture.
Angle down about ten to fifteen degrees. That puts the useful band of the frame where people walk instead of on the sky, and it also keeps the sky out of the exposure calculation, which stops the camera from silhouetting everyone in front of a bright background.
Distance is the constraint people underestimate. On a 2K sensor with a normal lens, a face is recognizable at roughly ten to fifteen feet and becomes an anonymous shape well before forty. The instinct when an area is too big is to buy a wider lens, but a wider lens makes the problem worse: it spreads the same pixels over more scene. The fixes that work are moving the camera closer, adding a second camera, or adding light. For the resolution side of this trade-off see premium cameras, where 4K genuinely earns its price on wide areas you expect to crop into afterward.
One more geometric note: mount so that people approach the camera rather than pass across it. A frame someone walks into gives you several seconds of a face. A frame someone crosses gives you a profile blur.
Light, Weather and the Things That Appear Later
Before drilling, look at what is behind the subject rather than at the subject. A camera aimed east or west will be washed out by direct sun at exactly the dawn and dusk hours that matter most, and a camera aimed at a bright sky will silhouette anyone in front of it. Aim so the light falls on faces, not behind them.
Under an eave or soffit is the best single outdoor position available on most houses. It sits at roughly the right height, it shelters the camera from driving rain, it shades the lens against glare, and it is out of casual reach.
Then plan for what is not there today. Owner reviews are full of cameras that worked perfectly for six weeks and then spent a whole season filming a hedge, a summer wreath, a growing shrub or a car that started being parked in a new spot. Walk the sight line and ask what will be in it in three months.
Never aim an outdoor camera through a window from inside. Infrared night vision reflects off glass and returns a white wall after dark, and it is one of the most frequently reported disappointments in the category. If a camera must shoot through glass, turn infrared off and rely on room light — and accept that the result will be poor.
Blind Spots and Neighbor Boundaries
Almost every first install leaves the same gaps. The area directly beneath the camera is one: a wall-mounted unit angled down still has a dead cone below it, which is why a camera mounted directly above the thing it is protecting often does not see it. Point at the object from across the space instead.
The others repeat just as reliably. The side return that nobody thinks about because nobody uses it. The second entry — a side gate, a basement door, a cellar hatch. The gap between two cameras that each cover their own patch and neither covers the overlap. Walk the property once and approach your own house the way somebody would who did not want to be seen; the route you instinctively take is the route that needs a camera.
Finally, aim within your own boundary. In the United States, recording what is visible from your own property is broadly permitted, but a camera should not be pointed into a space where a neighbor has a reasonable expectation of privacy — a bedroom or bathroom window in particular. Audio is treated differently from video in several states, so a camera with two-way talk aimed at a shared space carries more legal weight than the picture does. That is general information rather than legal advice, and the specifics vary by state, so check your own before enabling microphones outdoors.
After the Positions Are Chosen
Position first, then power, then product. That ordering saves most of the regret in this category, because the mounting spot decides what is even possible: an outlet under an eave makes a plug-in camera the easy answer, a spot twelve feet up at the back fence makes battery a ladder chore and solar worth the premium, and a rented apartment where nothing may be drilled rules out the exterior entirely — see best security camera for apartment for that case.
When the positions are settled, how to install a security camera covers the physical job for every power type, including the WiFi signal check at the exact mounting spot that owners skip most often and regret most reliably. The wider set of situational rankings is indexed at use-case guides, and for an open rear yard specifically, best security camera for backyard deals with the distance and darkness problems that make that position harder than it looks.