When in a Zoom meeting, it is generally helpful to know the names of and recognize everyone you’re talking to. This will be the case in family calls and is likely the case in team meetings at work, but there are plenty of scenarios where you wouldn’t necessarily know everyone in a call.
For example, if you’re a new team member, you may not know the names of, or recognize all of your colleagues yet. If you’re in a meeting with an external client, you may not recognize everyone. If you’re having a job interview you likely don’t know the person or people interviewing you.
In any of these scenarios, and in plenty of other similar scenarios, being able to see everyone’s names could be really helpful in being able to properly address people directly. Thankfully, for everyone that wants to be able to see this information, Zoom offers the option to display every participant’s username in the corner of their respective video feed.
This feature is generally enabled by default, but if you want to verify that it is enabled before a call, or if you want to re-enable it if you’ve noticed that the feature is disabled, you need to go into Zoom’s settings. To do so, click on your user icon in the top-right corner, then click on “Settings”.
Once in the settings, switch to the “Video” tab, then scroll down and tick the “Always display participant names on their video” checkbox. Any changes to this setting will be instantly applied, so you don’t need to leave and re-join an on-going call for it to take effect.
D says
Hello,
Do you know anything about making sure that your display name shows in full on the participant list? Regardless of my mother being the host, her name gets cut short by a ‘…’ at the end and she can see longer names with more characters showing in full. The only solution I got after contacting Zoom customer support is that you can stretch the participant list box by dragging the border, but even I can clearly see that her name isn’t showing in full whilst other participants’ names are, in the same meeting. Why is that? My mother isn’t happy about that. It would be nice if I manage to put her display name showing fully on the participant list.
Thanks, I hope my query makes sense.
george says
Perfect! Thank you. For some reason my student’s names auto-disappearing after the latest update. Thanks for the article!
M1242021 says
Hi! How do you do this on an Apple device? This doesn’t work on my iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air.
Scot Myhr says
How do you do this on an iPhone?