People clean photos before sharing and forget that a video is just as chatty. A clip recorded on a phone usually stores where it was filmed, which phone filmed it, when it started and which software last saved it. Sharing the original file hands all of that to whoever receives it.
What an MP4 or MOV can hold
- GPS position written by the camera app, often in a location atom named like a coordinate string.
- Make, model and software version of the phone or camera.
- Creation and modification dates of the file and of each track.
- Titles, comments and encoder names added by editing programs.
- Chapters and cover pictures added by media software.
Why re-encoding is not the answer
Exporting a video again can remove some tags, but it also recompresses the pictures, which lowers quality and takes a long time. Metadata sits in the container around the video and audio streams. A good cleaner copies the streams unchanged and rewrites only the container, so the picture and sound stay exactly as they were.
How to clean a video
- Open the Video Metadata Remover, or the page for your format: MP4 or MOV.
- Drop the file. Video is processed on our server, because it needs ffmpeg, and deleted a few minutes after you download it.
- Read the report of what was removed.
- Download the clean copy. It has the same video and audio and no personal tags.
Check the result
Compare the original and the cleaned file on the Compare Metadata page. The cleaned video should show only technical fields such as duration, codecs and resolution.