When you snap a picture using your digital camera, it saves the picture in the popular JPEG image format. But it doesn’t save just the picture data, it also saves some extra information along with the picture in form of metadata. This metadata is saved in the same JPEG image usually in the EXIF metadata format and can contain the geolocation coordinates of the place where the picture was taken, the time when it was taken, the model of the camera used, whether flash was used, what was the focal length and more.
If you upload your digital pictures on the internet and share them with others you are also sharing this information with strangers. If you want to prevent this from happening, you can remove the metadata from your images using an open-source tool called ExifCleaner which is a front-end of Phil Harvey’s tool of the same name. This tool has no options and operates in a very simple drag-n-drop manner. You simply have to launch ExifCleaner and then drop your image files on its window. It will automatically remove the metadata from the images in a matter of seconds.
ExifCleaner supports JPEG, PNG and TIFF images and can remove the metadata without altering the picture data. The picture will not be edited to compressed in any way, it will just remove the trailing metadata from the image file. But you should make a backup of the original files before using ExifCleaner as it simply overwrites the originals with the metadata removed image files.
The user interface of ExifCleaner is designed using Electron framework which makes the whole app unnecessarily big. It uses an external binary tool exifcleaner.exe by Phil Harvey to clean the metadata from the image files. Unfortunately, it is not handled properly and you will find dozens of instances of exifcleaner.exe running in the background even after you have closed the ExifCleaner window (fixed in version 3.0).
You can download ExifCleaner from https://github.com/szTheory/exifcleaner.