Cleaning one photo is easy. Cleaning 300 holiday photos, a client's 40 drone clips or every PDF in a shared folder is where most people get stuck, because most phones and computers only remove metadata one file at a time, and only part of it.

This guide goes device by device: what you can do for free on an iPhone, a Mac or a Windows PC, what those built-in options leave behind, and how to clean a whole batch of photos, videos and PDFs at once.

How can I bulk remove metadata from multiple files at once?

The short answer depends on what you have and where:

You have Free, built-in On our site
Photos or videos on an iPhone Share with Location off (removes location only) Batch of photos in your browser (Pro: 10 at a time)
Photos on a Mac Photos export with Location Information unticked (location only) Same batch, downloaded as one zip
Photos on a Windows PC File Explorer's Remove Properties and Personal Information Same batch
Videos, PDFs or RAW files Nothing built in removes it all Batches of 10 (Pro) or 50 (Business)
A folder that keeps filling up — Ask an AI assistant, or use our API

The built-in options are fine when location is your only worry. They leave the phone or camera model, dates and, for AI images, the AI labels. Details below.

How to bulk remove metadata on iPhone

For the copies you send: select the photos or videos in Photos, tap Share, then Options at the top. Turn off Location. If you see All Photos Data, turn that off too. Then send them, or save them to Files. The originals in your library keep their metadata.

For the photos in your library: on recent iOS versions, select several, tap the ••• button, choose Adjust Location, then No Location. Later shares won't carry it either.

What stays: the phone model, the iOS version and the date and time. For AI images you saved to your phone, any AI labels inside the file stay too.

To stop new photos getting a location at all: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never.

How to bulk remove metadata on a Mac

Mac has no built-in tool that removes all of a photo's metadata. The closest is exporting from Photos:

  1. Select the photos in Photos.
  2. Choose File → Export → Export [number] Photos.
  3. Untick Location Information and export.

That removes GPS only. Camera model, dates and serial numbers stay, and it doesn't work for PDFs or files outside your Photos library. For everything else, use the batch on our site (below), or ExifTool if you're comfortable in Terminal (at the end of this guide).

How to remove metadata from multiple files on Windows 10 and 11

  1. Select the files in File Explorer.
  2. Right-click, choose Properties, and open the Details tab.
  3. Click Remove Properties and Personal Information.
  4. Choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed and click OK.

It works well on JPEG photos, for the properties Windows knows about. It covers little in PDFs and videos, and is often greyed out for iPhone MOV videos.

Is there a free online bulk metadata remover?

Most online removers clean one file at a time for free, and many upload your photos to their server to do it. Ours works differently for photos:

  • Photos are cleaned in your browser and never uploaded. Free: one at a time, 10 a day with a free account. Pro ($10 a month): 10 at once. Business: 50 at once, downloaded together as one zip, renamed if you like. HEIC photos from iPhones work too.
  • Videos, PDFs and RAW files are cleaned on our server, several per batch:
Plan Files per batch Batch size Files a month Largest file
Free 1 — 3 100MB
Pro ($10/mo) 10 5GB 100 250MB
Business ($49/mo) 50 10GB 10,000 2GB

Every file is checked after cleaning, and videos aren't re-encoded, so there's no quality loss. Start on the photo cleaner, or the video, PDF and RAW pages.

Can I bulk remove metadata from videos and PDFs?

Yes, but the free tools that work on photos mostly don't work on these. We tested the common methods on real files:

How do I remove metadata from all files in a folder?

Without code: with our Business plan, you can ask Claude, Cursor or VS Code: "Remove the location and camera details from everything in my Downloads/trip folder." Our MCP add-on cleans the supported files in that folder and saves a -clean copy next to each original. Your originals are never changed.

With Terminal, free (photos only): install ExifTool and run this in the folder. -r includes the folders inside it:

exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r .

It's thorough for JPEG and PNG, and it overwrites the originals, so work on a copy. Don't use it on PDFs (the change can be undone), RAW files (it can change how the photo looks) or videos (it leaves dates and hidden tracks).

For developers: a folder script using our API

For folders that keep filling up, the metadata removal API cleans images, video, PDF and RAW with one call per file. This script cleans every supported file in one folder and saves name-clean.ext copies in another:

import os, sys, time, requests

API = "https://api.aimetadatacleaner.com"
KEY = os.environ["AMC_API_KEY"]
SUPPORTED = {".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png", ".webp", ".mp4", ".mov", ".m4v", ".3gp", ".mkv",
             ".webm", ".pdf", ".cr2", ".cr3", ".nef", ".arw", ".raf", ".rw2", ".dng"}

src, out = sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]
os.makedirs(out, exist_ok=True)

for name in sorted(os.listdir(src)):
    stem, ext = os.path.splitext(name)
    if ext.lower() not in SUPPORTED:
        print(f"skipped   {name}")
        continue
    with open(os.path.join(src, name), "rb") as f:
        r = requests.post(f"{API}/v1/clean", files={"file": f},
                          headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"})
    if r.status_code == 429:  # over 60 requests a minute: wait and retry once
        time.sleep(int(r.headers.get("Retry-After", 5)))
        with open(os.path.join(src, name), "rb") as f:
            r = requests.post(f"{API}/v1/clean", files={"file": f},
                              headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"})
    report = r.json()
    if not r.ok:
        print(f"failed    {name}: {report['error']['message']}")
        continue
    clean = requests.get(report["download_url"])
    with open(os.path.join(out, f"{stem}-clean{ext}"), "wb") as f:
        f.write(clean.content)
    print(f"{report['status']:<9} {name}: removed {', '.join(report['removed']) or 'nothing'}")

Run it with python clean_folder.py ./in ./out.

What happened when we ran it

We ran this exact script on a folder of 12 files (82MB): iPhone videos and a photo, a Word PDF, a PDF signed with Acrobat Sign, a video carrying Content Credentials, a WebM, and RAW files from Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon and Sony.

File Result Removed
iPhone 15 Pro .mov clean GPS location, device model, iOS version
iPhone .mp4 clean Dates
.mp4 with Content Credentials clean C2PA Content Credentials, title, author, dates, IDs
.webm clean Title, author, dates
Word .pdf clean Author, dates, software, IDs, XMP
Acrobat Sign .pdf clean Author, dates, software, digital signature (signer, signing date)
iPhone photo .jpg clean GPS location, phone model, author, XMP
Canon .cr3 clean GPS location, serial number, owner, dates
Fujifilm .raf clean Serial number, shutter count, dates
Nikon .nef clean GPS location, dates, software, captions
Sony A7 V .arw unverified Serial number, shutter count, dates, IDs
.avi skipped Not supported yet (convert to MP4)

Ten came back verified clean. The Sony file was cleaned but marked unverified: that camera is too new for any raw decoder, so we can't prove the photo data is unchanged, and the report says so instead of guessing.

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove all metadata from iPhone photos at once?

iPhone can only remove the location in bulk: share with Options → Location off, or select several photos and choose Adjust Location → No Location. To remove the phone model, dates and everything else, clean them on our site (10 at a time on Pro) or with an app that removes all metadata.

How do I bulk remove metadata on a Mac?

Photos can export without location. For everything else, use a batch cleaner like ours, or ExifTool in Terminal (exiftool -all= -r on a copy of the folder).

How do I remove metadata from multiple files in Windows 10 or 11?

Select them in File Explorer, open Properties → Details, click Remove Properties and Personal Information, and create copies with all properties removed. It works best on JPEG photos.

Is there a free bulk metadata remover?

ExifTool is free and cleans whole folders of photos, if you're comfortable in Terminal. On our site, free accounts clean one photo at a time (10 a day) in the browser; batches are part of Pro.

Does bulk removing metadata reduce quality?

Not with the right method. Our video cleaning copies the video and sound as they are, RAW sensor data is untouched, and photos can be kept pixel-identical.

Is it safe to use an online metadata remover?

It depends where your files go. Our photo cleaner runs in your browser, so photos are never uploaded. Videos, PDFs and RAW files are cleaned on our server in Germany and deleted right after.