MetaCleaner

Image files contain much more than just a digital photo. When you take a snapshot with a modern camera or smartphone, a wide range of details will be added to the new image file, like the used camera model, time, location and more. While it doesn't have any immediate drawbacks, the extra information could take up a significant amount of disk space if you work with a huge number of photos. If you've encountered this problem, you can turn to MetaCleaner to erase all the extra details from your images. Just give it your pictures, click a button and you're done.

The application is absolutely free, and it doesn't need to be installed, so you can have it up and running in no time. It doesn't ask for any supplementary tools or services, and you don't have to give up a significant portion of your RAM or processing power to run it.

Clearing metadata from pictures is not a difficult task. Simply importing one or more image files and clicking a button is sufficient to complete the operation, but you can do a few other things before you commit. For example, the application lets you place a watermark on the picture, to let others know the pictures belong to you since they don't have any more metadata.

Besides removing metadata and adding watermarks, the software lets you compress and scale your pictures, and apply special effects as well. You can pick between various visual effects in a drop-down menu, and you only need to tick a checkbox if you want to use it on your photos.

As previously suggested, it takes nothing more than a single click to start the cleanup process. Even with a large number of pictures imported, it only takes a few seconds to clear the metadata from your images. The software asks you for an output path each time you start a cleanup job, so you don't have to worry about overwriting or doing something permanent to your original files. However, if you want to make sure you won't encounter any naming conflicts, you can set the application to add a suffix to the file names before you start cleaning up.

When MetaCleaner is done with your picture, you will be able to fit almost double the number of pictures on the same storage unit.