Get video dimensions on macOS with built-in tools

• Tagged with macos, video
• Posted 10 February 2025

If the video file is indexed by Spotlight, you can use mdls to get the width and height of a video file.

You can look up Spotlight metadata attributes with the mdls command, which allows you to get the dimensions of video files:

$ mdls -name kMDItemPixelWidth -raw speech.mp4
640⏎

$ mdls -name kMDItemPixelHeight -raw speech.mp4
360⏎

However, this only works for files indexed by Spotlight. If the video file is somewhere that’s excluded by Spotlight, e.g. a temporary directory, this won’t work:

$ mdls -name kMDItemPixelWidth -raw /tmp/speech.mp4
(null)⏎

$ mdls -name kMDItemPixelHeight -raw /tmp/speech.mp4
(null)⏎