Suppose you want to sell an item online, and post photos and videos of the item online. And to protect yourself you plan to meet a potential buyer at a public place such as a Big Box Store parking lot. That’s more or less pointless if you link your ad to your photos and videos but they were taken at home, if they are geotagged, since you’ve now shared your home address with anyone on the internet. And geotagging is on by default for many people.

For Mac users, with photos, it is relatively simple to remove the geotag data right within Preview. (Open the photo, under Tools show Inspector, click on the ‘i’ icon, click on GPS, then click ‘remove location information’.)

However, for videos, the Mac offers no such shortcut to remove the location information on a video you took… a lamentable oversight IMO.

The free FFMPEG command line app will do the trick, and is easy to install.

Assuming you have Homebrew installed (Google it, if not):

brew install ffmpeg

Once installed, run it for each video with the options -map 0 -map_metadata -1 -c copy

I copy the videos into a desktop folder such as ‘nogps’ then run ffmpeg for each video in that folder:

cd ~/Desktop/nogps

ffmpeg -i IMG_1000.mov -map 0 -map_metadata -1 -c copy NOGPS_IMG_1000.mov

ffmpeg -i IMG_1001.mov -map 0 -map_metadata -1 -c copy NOGPS_IMG_1001.mov