A phone video carries more than a photo does. One iPhone 13 Pro clip we tested held its GPS position, the phone model, the iOS version, the recording time, and five hidden data tracks recording face detection frame by frame. Sending one clip, you might not care. Sharing a whole folder of family videos, drone footage or client work, you probably do.

This guide covers the ways to remove metadata from many videos at once: what your phone and computer can do for free, what they leave, and how to clean a batch without losing quality.

How do I remove metadata from multiple videos at once?

  • Location only, on iPhone: share them with Location switched off (steps below). Free, but the phone model and dates stay.
  • Everything, without installing anything: our video cleaner takes 10 videos per batch on Pro and 50 on Business. Nothing is re-encoded, and each video is checked after cleaning.
  • Everything, free, if you use Terminal: an ffmpeg loop (at the end of this guide).

How to remove metadata from videos on iPhone

  1. Select the videos in Photos and tap Share.
  2. Tap Options at the top and turn off Location.
  3. Send them, or save them to Files.

That only affects the copies you share. To remove the location from the videos in your library, open one, swipe up and choose Adjust → No Location; on recent iOS versions you can select several and use ••• → Adjust Location. Either way, the phone model, iOS version and recording time stay in the file. More detail in removing location from a video on iPhone and Android.

How to remove metadata from videos on Android

Android has no built-in way to remove a video's metadata, one at a time or in bulk. Turning off location for the Camera app stops new videos getting a GPS position; existing videos keep theirs. To clean the files themselves, use a cleaner like ours, which works in your phone's browser.

How to remove video metadata on Windows 10 and 11

File Explorer's Properties → Details → Remove Properties and Personal Information clears only the fields Windows shows. It doesn't touch GPS in iPhone MOV files, and is often greyed out for MOV. Re-exporting from an editor such as Clipchamp or Premiere re-encodes every video, which costs quality and time, and many editors copy some details across anyway.

How to remove video metadata on a Mac

macOS has no built-in way to strip metadata from videos. iMovie and QuickTime re-export the video, which re-encodes it. For a batch without quality loss, use our video cleaner or ffmpeg.

Is there a free way to remove metadata from videos?

Yes. On our site a free account cleans 3 videos a month, up to 100MB each, one at a time. For more:

Plan Videos per batch Batch size Videos a month Largest video
Free 1 — 3 100MB
Pro ($10/mo) 10 5GB 100 250MB
Business ($49/mo) 50 10GB 10,000 2GB

It takes MP4, MOV, M4V, 3GP, MKV and WebM. Download the cleaned videos one at a time, or all together as a zip. The other free route is ffmpeg, below.

Does removing metadata from a video reduce quality?

Not if it's done right. Metadata sits beside the picture and sound, so it can be removed by copying the video and audio as they are, without re-encoding. Our cleaner does that and checks that the video and sound are identical to the original. Re-exporting from an editor, or "saving as" in an app, re-encodes instead, and that does cost quality.

Does ExifTool remove metadata from videos?

Not fully, even though it's the usual advice. We tested five real videos (two iPhone MOVs, one with GPS and five hidden data tracks; an iPhone MP4; a video with Content Credentials; a WebM with a title and author) with three methods:

Method Result on our 5 videos
exiftool -all= Left the recording dates, the five iPhone data tracks and encoder labels. Can't write WebM or MKV at all.
ffmpeg -map 0 -map_metadata -1 -c copy Removed the tags, but kept all five data tracks, face detection included
The ffmpeg loop below Clean on all five, video and sound byte-identical
Our video cleaner Clean on all five, each file checked after cleaning

ExifTool left the recording date in three of the five files, all five hidden data tracks in the iPhone video (they're tracks, not tags), and the encoder labels. It refused the WebM outright: "Writing of WEBM files is not yet supported". MKV is the same.

For Terminal users: a free ffmpeg loop

ffmpeg is free for Mac, Windows and Linux, and removes metadata without re-encoding. This loop cleans every video in the current folder into a clean folder:

mkdir -p clean
for f in *; do
  case "$f" in
    *.[mM][oO][vV]|*.[mM][pP]4|*.[mM]4[vV]|*.[mM][kK][vV]|*.[wW][eE][bB][mM]) ;;
    *) continue ;;
  esac
  ffmpeg -nostdin -v error -i "$f" -map 0:V -map "0:a?" -map_metadata -1 -map_metadata:s -1 \
    -map_chapters -1 -fflags +bitexact -flags:v +bitexact -flags:a +bitexact -c copy "clean/$f"
done

Run it in Terminal on a Mac or Linux, or in Git Bash or WSL on Windows. We ran it in zsh and bash, on file names with spaces and upper-case extensions; the video and audio came out byte-identical.

Three traps it avoids:

  • -map 0, the common shortcut, copies every track, including iPhone's hidden face-detection tracks. -map 0:V -map "0:a?" keeps only picture and sound.
  • The quotes around 0:a?: without them, the Mac's default shell stops with "no matches found".
  • for f in *.mov *.mp4 stops with an error in the Mac's shell when the folder has no files of one of the types, so the loop checks extensions itself.

It won't help with AVI (convert those to MP4 first), and it doesn't tell you whether each file came out clean. More in what ffmpeg and ExifTool miss.

Whole folders, automatically

For a folder that keeps filling up (drone footage, dashcam clips, client uploads), our Business plan includes an AI assistant add-on: ask Claude, Cursor or VS Code to "remove the location from all the videos in ~/Movies/trip". Developers can use the metadata removal API instead; there's a ready-made Python script for videos.

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove metadata from multiple videos at once?

On iPhone you can remove the location from several videos by sharing them with Location off. To remove everything, use a batch cleaner like ours (10 videos at once on Pro, 50 on Business), or the free ffmpeg loop above.

How do I delete metadata from a video on my iPhone?

For the copy you send: Share → Options → Location off. For the video in your library: swipe up → Adjust → No Location. Both remove the location only; the phone model and date stay.

Is there a free way to remove metadata from videos?

Yes: ffmpeg is free and removes it without re-encoding, and our site cleans 3 videos a month on a free account.

Does ExifTool remove all metadata from videos?

No. In our test it left recording dates, the hidden data tracks in iPhone videos and encoder labels, and it can't write WebM or MKV files at all.

What metadata is in a phone video?

Usually the GPS position, phone model, software version and recording time. iPhones can add hidden data tracks, which in our test held face detection frame by frame. Videos from AI tools can carry Content Credentials naming the tool.