Sentry Clips
Watch Tesla Sentry clips on your iPhone
A thousand clips, four that matter
Sentry Mode writes an enormous amount of footage, most of it a leaf moving. The reason most owners stop reviewing it is that finding the one clip where someone actually approached the car means scrubbing through hundreds.
- Plug the drive into your phone and browse events by folder and date — Recent, Saved, and Sentry, including the per-event subfolders the car creates.
- Four cameras play in sync, streamed off the drive. Nothing is copied to your phone and nothing is uploaded — footage is read in place.
- On-device person detection sorts the pile: which events had someone near the car, on which camera, and for how long.
- Trim and export a four-up video for an insurer or a police report, composited from only the range you selected.
It reports what was measured, and nothing else
A clip summary in Custom Shop can only describe what the detector actually saw: which camera, when, and for how long. It structurally cannot generate a story about what happened, because the summary type has nowhere to put invented text — every sentence it shows is computed from detections.
That's deliberate. This footage ends up in insurance claims, and a sentence an app made up about intent or fault has no business in one.
Private by construction
Detection runs on the phone using Apple's Vision framework. There is no upload, no cloud inference, no per-clip fee, and no account. The app never sends footage anywhere — the only files that leave are the ones you explicitly export or share yourself.
It also streams rather than copies. A four-minute Sentry event across four cameras is large, and filling your phone to review it once is the wrong trade.
Questions owners ask
How do I view Tesla Sentry Mode clips on my iPhone?
Plug the TeslaCam USB drive into your iPhone with a USB-C reader and open Custom Shop's Clips tab. It reads the footage in place — nothing is copied or uploaded — and plays all four cameras in sync.
Can I find the Sentry clips where someone actually approached my car?
Yes. Custom Shop runs person detection on the device itself and sorts events by whether anyone was near the car, which camera saw them, and for how long, turning hundreds of clips into the few worth watching.
Can I export Tesla dashcam footage for an insurance claim?
Yes. Trim to the moment that matters and export a single composited four-up video of all cameras. Only the trimmed range is composited, and the export is capped in resolution so a phone can do the work without overheating.
Does the app upload my dashcam footage anywhere?
No. Footage is read from the drive in place and never transmitted. Detection runs on the device with Apple's Vision framework. Files leave only when you explicitly export or share them.