How to Mute a Video on iPhone

The fastest way to mute a video on iPhone is to open it in Photos, tap Edit, tap the sound button, and save it as a new clip so the original stays intact. Here's the full sequence, plus what actually happens to the audio when you do it, and why "muted" and "removed" aren't quite the same thing.

Muting is also the kind of edit that's easy to reach for reflexively , a clip with a bit of background noise, or one recorded somewhere embarrassing , when the actual fix might be somewhere else entirely. It's worth a second's pause before defaulting to it.

Mute a video on iPhone with the Photos app

Open the clip, tap Edit, on iOS 18 and later, that button lives at the bottom of the screen rather than the top-right corner where earlier versions placed it, then tap the sound button in the editor to turn off playback audio. Tap Done to finish the edit. There's no separate confirmation step and no volume slider involved: the sound button is a straight on/off switch for the whole clip.

Muted, not removed: what Save Video and Save as New Clip actually do

When you tap Done, Photos gives you two options: Save Video, which overwrites the clip, or Save Video as New Clip, which keeps the original untouched and creates a separate copy with the sound off. Muting in Photos turns audio off for playback rather than deleting the track outright, which is exactly why the New Clip option matters, on an edit like this, it's the safer default so you're never one tap away from losing the original. It also means the mute genuinely is reversible: the audio track is still physically there inside the file, just switched off, so tapping the sound button a second time brings it straight back.

When you want the voice, just not the noise

Muting is the right move when you don't want any sound at all. A clip that's going to run under music, or one where the audio adds nothing. If the goal is actually to keep the voice but lose the background noise, that's a different job, and muting throws away the part you wanted along with the part you didn't. Montaj handles that case directly, with a non-destructive edit and 100 levels of undo, so you can clean up the audio instead of cutting it entirely. Either way, muting a video on iPhone doesn't have to be a one-way decision, and it's worth deciding which job you actually have before you tap the sound button.