The usual sales approach is to count doors and windows and quote a camera for each. That produces a big number, a big invoice, and a system that still misses the thing you wanted it to catch.
Coverage isn’t about counting openings. It’s about approach paths.
Think in paths, not perimeter
Nobody materializes at your back slider. They arrive somewhere — the street, the driveway, a side gate, an alley, the neighbor’s fence line — and then they move to wherever they’re going. Every property has a small number of ways that can happen, and if you cover those paths well, you catch everything that follows.
Walk your own property and ask: if I were coming here uninvited and didn’t want to be seen, where would I come in? Most homes have three or four honest answers. That’s the number you’re designing around.
What a good camera position does
A useful camera does one of two jobs, and the two need different placements:
Identification. Close, tight field of view, at face height, covering a choke point everyone must pass — the front walkway, the gate, the driveway entrance. This is the footage that’s actually useful afterwards. A camera under a soffit pointed down at the top of someone’s head produces a video of a hat.
Overview. Wide, high, showing what happened and in what order. Not going to identify anyone, but it tells the story and tells you where to look on the identification cameras.
Most homes need two or three identification positions and two or three overview positions. That’s where the typical six-to-twelve range comes from — and it maps to paths, not to floor area. A compact house on a corner lot with three street-facing sides can genuinely need more than a larger house on an interior lot with one way in.
The mistakes that waste cameras
Mounting too high. The single most common error. A camera at second-storey height gets you the tops of heads. Identification cameras belong at eight to ten feet, angled to catch faces.
Pointing at the sky. Any camera framing bright sky behind a subject will silhouette them. West-facing cameras are useless for two hours a day unless framed to avoid it.
Ignoring night. Almost everything you care about happens after dark, and daytime performance tells you nothing about night performance. Any camera position should be verified after dark, on site, before it’s signed off. If your installer didn’t do this, the system hasn’t been commissioned — it’s been mounted.
Covering the same path twice. Two cameras on the front door and nothing on the side gate is a surprisingly common layout, usually because the front door is the easy install.
Resolution matters less than you’ve been told
Past a point, more megapixels stop helping. A 4K camera covering an entire yard has the same pixels-per-face at forty feet as a lower-resolution camera does at fifteen — and the 4K one eats four times the storage and needs more light to perform at night.
Match the camera to the distance it’s actually covering. That’s a better use of budget than buying maximum resolution everywhere.
Wired, unless you have a reason
Battery and WiFi cameras are fine for a rental or one awkward spot. For a whole-property system, PoE is meaningfully better: no batteries, no dropouts when the WiFi is busy, no compression artifacts, and power and data on one cable. The install is more work; the system then works for a decade.
Record locally
If footage lives only in someone’s cloud, an internet outage means no recording during exactly the window you’d care about — and you’re paying rent on access to your own video. A local recorder keeps running regardless, and remote viewing still works whenever the connection is up.
The deterrent is real
Visible cameras at approach points measurably reduce the chance of anything happening at all. That argues for cameras being seen at the paths in, while the identification positions can be more discreet. Placement and fixture choice handle it — you don’t have to choose between deterrence and a clean elevation.
Want this mapped properly for your property? We walk the site, map the approach paths, and design coverage around them — then verify every camera after dark before we call it finished. See security camera installation, or request a free security walkthrough.