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How to Remove Metadata From a Video on iPhone or Mac

· 7 min read

An iPhone showing a paused video of a birthday party, beside a strip of film with one frame covered in red tape and a small red paper map pin.

Videos carry the same hidden details photos do, and people check them far less often. A clip from your iPhone records where it was filmed, which phone filmed it, and when. Post it to a forum or send it to a stranger, and that information goes along with the video file.

Removing metadata from a video is harder than doing it for a photo, and most of the tools that show up in search either upload your video to a server or re-encode it, which costs quality. Here’s what’s in the file, the ways to remove metadata from a video on iPhone or Mac, and what each one leaves behind.

What an iPhone video records about you

iPhone videos are QuickTime movies (.mov), and iOS writes metadata into them as it records. In a typical clip you’ll find:

  • Location: GPS coordinates, and often altitude, stored as a single text value. This is what puts the video on the map in Photos.
  • Device: the make (Apple), the exact iPhone model, and the iOS version.
  • Dates: the recording date and time with your time zone, plus separate timestamps in the file’s own headers.

A video from a standalone camera, a drone, or an editing app can also carry a title, author, comments, copyright, and the name of the software that exported it.

Why removing video metadata is tricky

A video file isn’t one blob. It’s a set of nested boxes. The moov box holds the index: where every frame and every slice of audio sits in the file. The mdat box holds the frames themselves. Most metadata lives inside moov, alongside that index.

The index works by byte offsets, meaning “frame 1,204 starts 18,442,331 bytes into the file”. Your iPhone saves the index after the frames, but many files store it before them, especially videos exported or optimized for streaming. Remove metadata from one of those and every frame moves. Every offset in the index is now wrong and the video won’t play, so a tool has to handle both layouts.

Removing metadata from a video without re-encoding Two rows showing the boxes inside a movie file. Before: a file-type box, a movie index box containing the frame offsets and the location, device and date metadata, then the video and audio frames. After: the metadata is gone, the frames move earlier in the file unchanged, and every offset in the index is recalculated to point at them. Before (index-first file) ftyp moovframe offsets location, model,recording date mdatvideo and audio frames After ftyp moovoffsets, fixed mdatsame bytes, moved up No re-encode.No quality loss.
Taking metadata out shrinks the index, which moves the frames. A lossless tool rewrites every offset to match instead of re-encoding.

So a tool has two choices. It can re-encode the whole video into a fresh file, which is simple but slow and loses quality every time. Or it can rewrite the index so every offset points at the frames’ new position, and copy the frames byte for byte. The second approach is what you want, and it’s what the methods below do, except where noted.

Option 1: Turn off Location when sharing from iPhone

The share sheet in Photos has the same switch for videos as it does for photos.

  1. Open the video in Photos and tap Share.
  2. Tap Options at the top of the share sheet.
  3. Turn off Location and tap Done, then share.

This is fast and built in. But it only removes location, only for that one share, and the next share has Location switched back on. The model, iOS version and recording date go out with the video. You can also remove the location from the video in your library: open it, tap the Info button, tap Adjust, and choose No Location. The same limits apply.

Option 2: ffmpeg on a Mac (free, command line)

If you’re comfortable in Terminal, ffmpeg can copy a video into a new file without its metadata and without re-encoding. Install it with Homebrew (brew install ffmpeg), then run:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -map 0 -c copy -map_metadata -1 -fflags +bitexact output.mov

What each part does:

  • -c copy copies the video and audio streams as they are, with no re-encode.
  • -map 0 copies every track, including a second audio track. Without it, ffmpeg keeps only the best video and audio track. (Apple’s timed-metadata tracks come through as unreadable data tracks either way, which doesn’t affect playback.)
  • -map_metadata -1 drops the metadata instead of copying it across. That includes location, make, model and the recording date.
  • -fflags +bitexact stops ffmpeg from writing its own name and version into the output.

We tested this on a QuickTime file with GPS coordinates, make, model and creation date. The output had none of them, its header dates were zeroed, and the video frames were identical in size and count to the original. If a file has unusual data tracks and ffmpeg refuses to copy them, remove -map 0; ffmpeg will then keep just the main video and audio tracks.

Option 3: ExifTool (free, command line)

ExifTool is the standard tool for reading and writing metadata, and it can rewrite QuickTime files without touching the video data:

exiftool -all= input.mov

This removes the location, device and descriptive metadata, and keeps a backup of the original as input.mov_original. In our test, it left the timestamps in the movie’s headers untouched, because those are part of the file’s structure rather than optional metadata. If the recording date matters to you, use the ffmpeg command above instead.

ExifTool is also the best way to check a file. Run exiftool -G1 -a input.mov to list everything in it, with the group each field came from.

Option 4: Online video metadata removers

A search for “remove metadata from video” turns up plenty of free websites. They work, but they share two problems. Most of them upload your video to their server to process it, which is an odd trade if the reason you’re stripping metadata is privacy. And many have file size limits well below what a few minutes of 4K iPhone video weighs. Some also re-encode, so check the output size: a much smaller file means the video was compressed again.

Option 5: Scrubb on iPhone, iPad or Mac

Scrubb is our app for this, and video is one of the main reasons we built it. It removes metadata from MOV and MP4 files by rewriting the index, as described above, entirely on your device. Your videos never leave your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

  1. Open Scrubb and tap Choose Photos to pick videos from your library, or Choose Files. On a Mac, drag files onto the window.
  2. Open the inspector to see every metadata field in the video, grouped by what it reveals. Location, model, iOS version and recording date are listed in plain language.
  3. Pick a preset (Location Only, Share Safely or Remove Everything) or choose fields yourself. On videos, the descriptive metadata is removed as a block, so even Location Only also removes the model, iOS version and recording date.
  4. Save the cleaned copy to Photos, share it directly, or on a Mac save it next to the original. Your original isn’t changed.

Before saving, Scrubb re-reads the rewritten movie, confirms its structure is intact, and checks that none of the fields you removed are still present. If a file fails, it isn’t saved. Like ExifTool, Scrubb leaves the timestamps in the movie’s structural headers in place.

The inspector is free with no limit. Your first five cleaned exports are free, and unlimited cleaning is a one-time $7.99.

Which option should you use?

  • You’re sharing one clip and only care about location: the share sheet’s Location switch is enough.
  • You’re comfortable in Terminal and want everything gone, dates included: the ffmpeg command.
  • You want to see what’s in the file first, clean videos on your iPhone, or handle a batch without the command line: Scrubb.

Whichever you choose, check the result once. Metadata is invisible by design, and you only find out a tool didn’t do its job after the file is out there.

For photos, the steps are similar but the tools differ. See how to remove location from photos on iPhone.