I store my processed photos and videos in Apple Photos so I can view them from anywhere on my phone or computer. Viewing media in chronological order is fundamental but I’d like to have other metadata available if at all possible. That’s possible for images but EXIF data for video is a mess as far as I can tell from reading scattered forum posts. I’d love to be able to cite some sources on this; please let me know if there is an authoritative source for this information.

Apple Photos parses dates inside video files but doesn’t seem to parse location, camera, or lens metadata. However, it does store original files in a recoverable fashion, so if I ensure that all metadata is included in video files, there is a chance that Apple Photos (or some other application) will be able to read that metadata in the future.

As verified by experiment, Exiftool 12.761 (and likely greater versions) can read and write metadata from MOV and MP4 video files. MOV files are QuickTime containers while MP4 files are MPEG-4 containers.

EXIF data in video files is generally QuickTime tags.

I use Handbrake and other tools to compress processed video to maximize space efficiency.

The situation:

  • DSLR and mirrorless cameras write metadata to video files that they create. Apple Photos does not parse this metadata.
  • Exiftool reads metadata just fine from camera video files.
  • Various ffmpeg and ffprobe incantations didn’t demonstrate an ability to read metadata from camera video files. Maybe this is possible but if it is, it’s not easy and it’s not documented in a way that’s discoverable by even expert software programmers.
  • Apple Photos does not read metadata (apart from timestamps) in either MOV or MP4 containers.
  • Handbrake can get video files down to much more reasonable sizes while keeping decent quality, especially when writing H.265, but it doesn’t pass through EXIF data such as camera make, model, lens, or timestamps.
  • A trial of ffworks showed that it didn’t pass through metadata either.
  • Handbrake can only output MP4 containers while fftools can also output MOV containers (due to underlying ffmpeg support for both container formats).

To at least retain video metadata, do the following:

After compressing with Handbrake, use Exiftool to copy tags from the source file to the output file:

exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile [source] -all [output]

Use Exiftool to geotag a video - HoudahGeo can’t geotag video files.

Either copy location tags from a source image…

exiftool -tagsfromfile [source] -location:all [output]

…or write the location tags explicitly.

exiftool -GPSLatitude=[decimal degrees] -GPSLatitudeRef=[N|S] -GPSLongitude=[decimal degrees] -GPSLongitudeRef=[E|W]

The ffworks tool does have some nice GUI display of video quality metrics, which may prove useful for quick evaluation of quality loss when recompressing.

  1. Exiftool has weird nonstandard command-line arguments. Get the version of Exiftool by running exiftool -ver. ↩