MOV Metadata Remover

iPhones record video as MOV files, and every clip carries a small dossier: the exact place where you filmed, the phone model, the iOS version and the time to the second. A MOV metadata remover copies the picture and sound into a new file and leaves that dossier behind. The video is not re-encoded, so quality, HDR colour and rotation come through unchanged. Add a MOV above, read what it held and download the clean copy. MOV files are processed on our server and deleted within minutes.

What an iPhone video carries

QuickTime, the format behind MOV, stores metadata under named keys. Apple’s keys all begin with com.apple.quicktime. These are the ones that matter.

The time-zone offset in the creation date tells a viewer roughly where in the world you were even before they read the coordinates, and the Live Photo identifier ties a loose video to the photo it came from. All of these live in the file, and none of them is visible when you play the clip.

What the cleaner does with a MOV

• Tags and keys. Every global and per-track tag is dropped, including the com.apple.quicktime keys above.
• Header times. The creation and modification times in the movie, track and media headers are written as empty. In our tests a planted creation date was gone from all three.
• Data tracks. Timed metadata tracks are not copied. We checked this with a timecode track, which was gone after cleaning. Live Photo videos carry a timed metadata track of their own, which falls under the same rule, though we had no real Live Photo file to try.
• Chapters are removed.
• Video and audio are copied, bit for bit. Subtitle tracks are kept, with their language codes.
• Language codes are kept. Track titles and handler names are removed.

HDR, colour and rotation

Phones record HDR video as 10-bit HEVC with colour tags that tell a player how to interpret the picture. Those tags travel with the stream, not in the metadata that gets removed. We tested with a 10-bit HEVC clip tagged with the BT.2020 colour primaries and the HLG transfer function, the combination used for iPhone HDR video. After cleaning, the primaries, the transfer, the colour space and the 10-bit pixel format were all unchanged, and the HEVC stream was bit-identical to the original.

Rotation is a setting in the track header rather than a tag, and it is kept. A test clip marked as rotated 90 degrees still reported that rotation after cleaning, so portrait clips stay portrait.

Live Photos and the file that goes with them

The video half of an iPhone Live Photo is an ordinary MOV with the same location and device keys as any other clip, plus the content identifier that pairs it with the still. If you share that MOV on its own, clean it like any other video. The paired still is a separate image file with its own EXIF and GPS, which the image metadata remover handles. HEIC stills are not supported there, so export them as JPEG first.

Is my file a MOV or an MP4?

Both formats are built from the same kind of boxes, and an MP4 is in effect a standardised cousin of QuickTime’s MOV. iPhones and Macs write MOV by default, and Android phones and most other cameras write MP4. The tool handles each as its own type and keeps the container you gave it. The main difference you will notice is the vocabulary of the tags: MOV files from Apple use the com.apple.quicktime keys listed above, while MP4 files from Android use a position box and their own keys, which the MP4 page describes.

Stop it at the source

Cleaning a clip afterwards works for every video you have already recorded. To stop the location being written in future, go to Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera and choose Never. That also applies to photos taken in the same app.

Clean a MOV in four steps

1. No account needed to start. Guests can clean 3 videos a month, a free account 10.
2. Add the MOV. Drag it anywhere on the page or choose it. The upload shows its progress.
3. Wait a few seconds. The server copies the tracks into a clean file and scans the result.
4. Download and read the report. It lists the keys and tags found and how many remain. Verified clean appears only when none do.

Files can be up to 25 MB for guests, 25 MB on a free account, 100 MB on Starter, 500 MB on Pro and 1,000 MB on Business, and the monthly video allowance is 3, 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000. A minute of iPhone video is often tens of megabytes and 4K runs into hundreds, so check the limit of your plan. The original is deleted as soon as cleaning finishes, and the clean copy is kept for at most 15 minutes. See pricing. For a bigger clip, this FFmpeg command does the same thing on your own computer:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -map 0:v -map 0:a -dn -map_metadata -1 -map_metadata:s:v -1 -map_metadata:s:a -1 -map_chapters -1 -c copy -fflags +bitexact clean.mov

Check the result yourself

exiftool -a -G1 -s clean.mov
ffprobe -v error -show_entries format_tags:stream_tags -of json clean.mov

Our video metadata remover page covers all formats, and the MP4 page goes through the box structure that MOV shares.

Frequently asked questions