How Face In works,
step by step.

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Face In is a small app that lives in your menu bar. When your Mac locks, it looks through the camera, recognises your face and types your Mac password into the real macOS field for you. It doesn’t replace your password: it saves you from typing it.

What you need

• A Mac with macOS 14 Sonoma or later and a camera.
• Your Mac login password.
• About five minutes.

1. Install and open

Download Face In, move it to your Applications folder and open it. Its icon appears in the menu bar, next to the clock. The first time it opens, macOS asks for Touch ID or your Mac password once: that unlocks the protected space where Face In keeps what you save.

2. Enrol your face

The setup guide walks you through it. Enrolling takes less than a minute: sit as you normally do, look at the camera and follow the hints on screen, which ask you to come a little closer and turn your head slowly. A tip that makes a real difference: enrol in the place and light where you actually use the Mac.

3. Save your Mac password

Face In unlocks your Mac by typing your password, so it needs to know it. You type it once, inside the app, and it is encrypted on your Mac immediately. From then on it is never shown again, never written to any log and never sent anywhere. The Privacy and security section explains exactly how it is kept.

4. Grant the two permissions

macOS will ask for two permissions, each with a clear job:

• Camera, so Face In can see you. macOS asks the first time Face In needs to look, never before.
• Accessibility, so Face In can type into the macOS lock screen. Sending keystrokes to the lock screen is the only way any app can unlock a Mac, and this permission allows exactly that. You’ll find it in System Settings, under Privacy & Security.

5. Try it

Lock your Mac with Ctrl Cmd Q and look at the camera. A moment later, you’re in. The setup guide also has a test button that does this for you.

Everyday use

Once set up, Face In fades into the background. When the Mac locks or wakes, it takes a brief look, recognises you and types your password. When it isn’t sure, it does nothing: the Mac simply stays locked and you type your password or use Touch ID, as always. Face In never blocks the normal ways in.

When it looks for you

Out of the box, Face In looks for you when the screen locks and when the Mac wakes. In the settings you can change that, including a quieter mode where it only looks when you press Space on the lock screen.

The menu bar

From the menu bar icon you can open the settings, test recognition without locking anything, and lock Face In itself. Locked, it stops unlocking for everyone until Touch ID or your Mac password bring it back.

If you change your Mac password

Save the new one in Face In’s settings. Until you do, unlocking won’t stick, and after a few of those Face In pauses itself and tells you why. It does this on purpose: repeating a wrong password could lock your macOS account, and Face In would rather step aside than let that happen. Saving the new password turns it back on.

The activity log

The Activity tab shows every unlock attempt: when it happened, whether it worked and which face was recognised. It keeps no images and no passwords, it never leaves your Mac, and you can clear it whenever you like.

Faces and permissionsPro and Enterprise

A Mac at home is rarely one person’s Mac. On Pro you can enrol up to 5 faces, and on Enterprise as many as you need. Each face gets its own permissions, so the Mac behaves differently depending on who is in front of it.

What each face may do

For every face you decide, with simple switches, whether that person may unlock the Mac, change Face In’s settings, quit Face In, and open any app or only the apps on their list. Owner and Guest are ready-made starting points; adjust them face by face.

Settings that answer to you

The settings window itself can be locked to your face: it opens when Face In sees someone allowed to open it. Touch ID and your Mac password always work as well, so you are never locked out of your own app.

Re-enrolling

Enrolling a face again under the same name replaces the old enrolment and keeps that person’s permissions and app rules. Useful after a new pair of glasses or a very different haircut.

App rulesPro and Enterprise

Beyond unlocking, each face can have its own list of apps. When you hand the Mac to a child or a guest, their rules come along: the apps you chose open normally, and the rest politely decline.

What a guest sees

When someone opens an app that isn’t on their list, a small panel explains that the app isn’t available for them and the app closes. No alarms, no shame: a gentle no.

The rules follow the person

Face In remembers who unlocked the Mac. When you unlock it, everything opens. When a guest unlocks it, their list applies, until the Mac locks again.

A barrier, not a wall

App rules are made for everyday, shared moments. They are very good at keeping a borrowed Mac on track, and we are honest that they are not a security boundary against a determined, technical person with time alone at the keyboard. For that, macOS user accounts are the right tool.

Touch ID promptsPro and Enterprise

Some apps ask for Touch ID during the day, most often Chrome, when it wants to show or fill a saved password. Face In can answer that prompt for you: it recognises your face and fills the official macOS prompt, the same one you would answer by hand.

What we promise, and what we don’t

The Chrome flow is tested end to end, from the prompt appearing to the password being filled, and it’s the one we stand behind. Other apps use the same macOS prompt and may well work, but we only promise what we have tested ourselves.

Two things always need you in person: passkeys, which use a different mechanism, and the first login after a restart, which macOS reserves for your password by design.

Who can answer prompts

Prompts are only ever answered for the Mac’s owner face. A guest’s face never fills a password prompt, no matter their other permissions.

Privacy and security

Recognition happens on your Mac

When Face In looks at you, the camera image is read, compared and discarded right there on the device. No frame is uploaded, and no frame is even written to disk. If you unplugged the network cable, recognition would work exactly the same.

There are no photos of you

Face In doesn’t keep pictures. What it saves when you enrol is a short list of numbers that describe your face to Face In and to nothing else. Those numbers are encrypted on your disk, alongside everything else the app stores.

How your password is kept

Your Mac password is encrypted with strong, modern encryption the moment you save it. The key that opens it lives in your Mac’s Keychain and is released only by Touch ID or your Mac password. Face In reads the password at the last possible moment, only after it has recognised you and confirmed you may unlock, and types it only into the official macOS field. It never appears on screen, in the activity log or in any file you could stumble on.

Why there is no “password API”

A service can only leak what it holds, and Face In holds nothing of yours. There is no account to create, no server that knows your face, no cloud backup, no sync between Macs and no API that could fetch, send or receive your password. Everything Face In knows lives in one encrypted folder on your Mac, plus one key in your Keychain. That isn’t a setting you have to find and switch on. It’s how the app is built, and there is no other mode.

What goes over the internet

One thing: when Face In confirms your licence, it talks to the licensing service, so your licence can be valid on one Mac at a time. That check carries nothing from your camera, your keyboard or your disk. No faces, no passwords, no activity, no analytics. Whatever happens to that connection, your face and your password stay exactly where they were: on your Mac.

The honest limits

Face In sees you through one camera, so it cannot read depth the way Face ID does with its dedicated hardware. Printed photos and photos on a phone screen were refused in every test we ran, because Face In looks for signs of a live person before accepting a face. A good video of you, played on a screen, can get through.

So treat Face In as convenience, not as extra protection: it makes unlocking effortless, and it never makes your Mac safer than your password alone. If someone might have a video of you and physical access to your Mac, stay with your password or Touch ID. And whenever Face In is unsure, it chooses the safe side and leaves the Mac locked.

Removing your data

Delete any face, or the saved password, from the settings at any time. Remove the app and its data and nothing of yours remains anywhere, because no copy ever existed outside your Mac.

When something goes wrong

It doesn’t see me

Light matters most: light on your face works, a bright window behind you doesn’t. Sit at a normal working distance from the screen. If you’ve changed a lot since enrolling, or enrolled in very different light, enrol again where you actually use the Mac. It takes less than a minute.

It recognises me, but nothing is typed

Check the Accessibility permission: System Settings, Privacy & Security, Accessibility, and make sure Face In is on. Without it, macOS doesn’t let Face In type into the lock screen.

It types, but the Mac stays locked

Almost always this means your Mac password changed and Face In still has the old one. After a few unlocks that don’t stick, Face In pauses automatic unlocking to protect your macOS account from repeated wrong attempts. Save the new password in the settings and it resumes on its own.

Nothing happens at all

Three quick checks: Face In is running (its icon is in the menu bar), automatic unlocking isn’t paused, and your licence is active. The Activity tab tells you what the app saw on each attempt, which usually points straight at the cause.

Still stuck?

Write to [email protected] and tell us what the Activity tab shows. A real person answers, and the log makes it much easier to help you quickly.

Your licence

A licence works on one Mac at a time. Moving it is your call and takes a minute: release it on the old Mac, activate it on the new one, both from inside the app.

Monthly and yearly plans can be cancelled whenever you want. The time you paid for stays yours, and when the subscription ends the app stops unlocking. Your Mac itself is untouched: your password and Touch ID keep working as they always did. Lifetime is one payment, and that version of the app is yours for good, with nothing to renew.

You have seven days to ask for your money back, no reason needed. Payments and refunds are handled by Paddle.com, our reseller and Merchant of Record. The exact wording lives in the Terms of Service and the Refund Policy, and what little data the website itself touches is in the Privacy Policy.