Video Metadata Remover

What metadata is hidden in a video file?

A video file is two things: the compressed video and audio streams, and a container (MP4, MOV, WebM) that wraps them. The container has room for user data, and cameras use it. An iPhone writes the GPS coordinates of the spot where you pressed record, the device model, the iOS version, the capture date with time zone and, for a Live Photo clip, a unique content identifier that pairs it with the still. Android phones store the location as a ©xyz atom. GoPro cameras and newer DJI drones add a whole telemetry track with a GPS fix several times per second, Sony cameras log per-frame lens and exposure data (and a position on models with GPS), and all three can record the camera's serial number. Editing software adds XMP packets naming the program and sometimes the author; AI video generators and a first few professional cameras add C2PA content credentials. All of it travels with the file, and anyone with a metadata viewer can read it. Videos have no standard EXIF block (EXIF is a still-photo format), but the user-data atoms of an MP4 or MOV carry the same fields, and that is what people mean by removing EXIF data from a video.

How do I remove the location from a video?

Drop the file above. The tool lists every field it finds, GPS location first with a map link so you can see what it gives away, and then overwrites those fields in place. If you only want to stop the location leaving your phone, the phone can often do that on its own: on iPhone, open the share sheet, tap Options at the top and switch off Location; on a Samsung phone, tick Remove location data in the Gallery share sheet. Google Photos leaves location out of the links and albums it shares by default, but it cannot strip a camera-recorded location from the file itself, and anything you send on to another app keeps it. Use this page when the video has already left the phone, when it comes from an action camera or a drone, or when you want the device model, serial number, timestamps and editing history gone as well.

Can I remove video metadata without uploading the file?

Yes, and with video it matters twice: the file is personal, and it is big. Most online metadata removers are upload services: your video goes to their server, is processed there and sits on their disk until a cleanup job runs, and a multi-gigabyte recording spends minutes on the wire for nothing. This page does the editing with JavaScript on your own machine and never loads the video stream into memory, so a 4 GB recording is handled the same way as a 4 MB clip: only the headers are read and the video data is copied straight through. Desktop browsers handle multi-gigabyte files; on phones, very large downloads depend on the browser and free storage. It runs in the browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone, with nothing to install. You can check the no-upload claim: open your browser's DevTools Network tab, drop a video and clean it. The only request you might see is the site's own tiny analytics ping, which carries a click event and never the file.

Does removing metadata re-encode the video or reduce its quality?

No. The tool never touches the video or audio data. It finds the metadata structures inside the container (QuickTime atoms, Matroska elements) and overwrites them with the format's own zero-filled padding, so the cleaned file has exactly the same size, the same streams byte for byte, and plays wherever the original did, since no byte a player needs has moved. There is nothing to recover from the padding: the old bytes are overwritten with zeros, not merely unlinked. That also makes the result easy to check: drop the cleaned file back onto this page and it should find nothing to remove. If you prefer the command line, ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -map_metadata -1 -c copy out.mp4 gets you most of the way without re-encoding; it rewrites the container rather than patching it in place, and per-track tags need their own -map_metadata:s flags.

What does this tool remove, and what stays?

Removed from MP4, MOV, M4V, 3GP and M4A: GPS coordinates and location names, device make and model, software and encoder names, creation and modification dates in the movie and track headers, titles, authors, comments and every other user-data atom, XMP and C2PA packets, cover and preview images, manufacturer blobs such as Samsung's trailer data, and timed-metadata tracks (GoPro GPMF, DJI and Sony telemetry, Apple mebx) including their samples inside the media data, unless you untick the option above. In WebM and MKV: the Tags block, title, date, original file name and image attachments; the mandatory muxing and writing app fields stay but are blanked. Kept: everything a player needs (codec settings, orientation, chapters, subtitles, timecode tracks, font attachments), plus track and handler names and Matroska segment IDs. Three limits: AVI, WMV and FLV are other containers and not supported; a movie with a compressed header (rare, old QuickTime) cannot be edited; and removing the Apple content identifier means the clip is no longer recognised as the Live Photo partner of its still when the pair is re-imported. For photos there is the Image Metadata Stripper, for documents the PDF Metadata Remover.

Is it legal to remove metadata from a video?

Yes. Stripping metadata from footage you own is routine; many newsrooms and law firms do it as policy before publishing or sharing. The exception is material you must preserve unaltered, for example evidence or a file under legal hold: clean a copy and keep the original. Removing a C2PA manifest is fine for privacy, but it is exactly what provenance checks look for, so a platform that requires content credentials will treat the cleaned file as unsigned.