As its name clearly states, ExifCleaner is a tool designed to help you remove EXIF metadata from your images, videos, and even PDFs.
This could potentially be a good security measure, but it can also help you decrease the size of your files.
Very efficient, Electron-based metadata remover
First off, we have to point out that ExifCleaner is built on top of the ExifTool library. The app is also designed using the modern web framework Electron.
The app works on all major OSes out there (Linux, Windows, and macOS), and it’s free and open-source.
Advantages
It may look simplistic, but ExifCleaner does its job rather well. For starters, it’s worth noting that it has an efficient, distraction-free GUI with full support for drag and drop and a dark mode. This makes loading multiple files a particularly easy task (yes, it supports batch processing).
Since we’re on the subject of batch processing, ExifCleaner can also efficiently distribute the workload across multiple CPU cores (multi-core batch processing).
It can remove metadata from various types of popular image formats such as PNGs, JPGs, GIFs, and TIFFs, as well as popular video formats such as M4As, MOVs, QTs, and MP4.
The app also allows you to remove the metadata from PDF files, however, please note that this feature is not fully developed, meaning it only partially removes the EXIF info from PDFs.
Few drawbacks
Even though it works great, ExifCleaner might not be to everyone’s liking. As mentioned before, it’s an Electron app, and this comes with a series of inherent drawbacks. For example, the executable size (even on Linux) is well over 200 MB, and the memory usage is, as expected, above 100 MB.
Last but not least, the app is (currently) not capable of removing extended filesystem attributes.
Verdict
ExifCleaner is a modern and very efficient little tool that will definitely come in handy to all those who are looking for a quick and effortless way of removing EXIF info from their files.
