How to see everyone on Zoom – the gallery view

Video con­fer­ences with many par­ti­cipants can become confusing. With Zoom and Zoom al­tern­at­ives such as Skype and Microsoft Teams, the current speaker is usually high­lighted or the main display. Depending on the settings on Zoom, however, you’ll only see a few of the other par­ti­cipants. There is a solution to this, though! With the Zoom gallery view you can see more meeting par­ti­cipants on your screen sim­ul­tan­eously. How to see everyone on Zoom will be the topic of this article.

Does this sound familiar? You create a Zoom meeting or join a Zoom meeting and all you see is a list of names. Depending on which speaker is currently active, the video image might jump back and forth between speakers. Wouldn’t it be nice to see all par­ti­cipants at a glance or decide for yourself how Zoom displays the par­ti­cipants of the video con­fer­ence? Easily done!

There are various layout settings for this. For example, you can pin a video to avoid jumping between active speakers, or you can hide videos without video trans­mis­sion. It’s possible to minimise or maximise the video chat. To see all par­ti­cipants, you need to use the Zoom gallery view. It allows you to see up to 49 par­ti­cipants at the same time and to scroll to all other Zoom par­ti­cipants by arrow or swipe. Depending on the Zoom version, up to 1,000 par­ti­cipants can attend a meeting!

Long video con­fer­ences with lots of people can be ex­haust­ing. There is even a term for this kind of ex­haus­tion: Zoom fatigue.

The pre­requis­ite for the gallery view on Zoom is that no-one can be sharing their screen on Zoom. If this pre­requis­ite is met, you can see all par­ti­cipants with the following steps in the desktop client or on the app.

• Step 4: You will be shown a maximum of 25 or 49 par­ti­cipants at a time in the tile layout as soon as there are more than two par­ti­cipants in the meeting. For smaller meetings, the gallery view adjusts auto­mat­ic­ally. For larger meetings, you can click on the arrow or swipe to show more par­ti­cipants that do not fit on the first page.
• Step 5: In gallery mode, you can also arrange par­ti­cipant windows as you wish with a single click. Other par­ti­cipants will not notice this. You can also minimise the Zoom window by clicking the minimise icon (top right on Windows and top left on Mac) or double-click the window to switch to full-screen mode.

To return to the ‘Speaker View’, click the ‘View’ icon again in the upper right corner.

• Step 3: The Zoom mobile app displays up to four par­ti­cipants at once in the gallery view. This is also the case on Android tablets with larger screens – and this is the best way for how to see everyone on Zoom on a mobile device. If you want to see more par­ti­cipants, swipe further to the left. Swipe to the right to return to the pre­vi­ously displayed par­ti­cipants or to the Active Speaker.

Touch the screen again and tap the sil­hou­ette icon on the left if you want to return to the Speaker View.