The metadata contained within your digital photos can be very useful and incredibly revealing. It can include information such as the camera or device used to take the photos, timestamps and even location. If you are sharing the photos you have taken online, sharing such information can pose a risk to privacy and security.

And this is why a tool like ExifCleaner is so valuable. This handy free tool lets you quickly and easily remove Exif data from your photos so they can be posted online without fear of revealing anything you do not want to. When it comes to photos, there is support for a number of popular image formats -- PNG, JPG, GIF and TIFF, but the program capabilities are not limited to photos.

ExifCleaner can also be used to strip data from PDF files and videos – here there is support for the M4A, MOV, QT and MP4 formats.

The program is capable of handling huge numbers of files at once, making it perfect for anyone looking to batch process lots of photos in one fell swoop. Getting files into ExifCleaner is a simple matter of drag and drop, but you may be disappointed to find that there are no image previews available within the software.

This means that when you see a summary of the number of pieces of Exif data that have been removed from images, you are left having to determine what a file is based on its filename. Of course, the solution here is to name files in a helpful way before processing them, but that's not really the point.

ExifCleaner provides a brief overview of the data that can be found within a given file, but the way this is display could be far better integrated into the interface. Having processed files, you'll see a summary of how many pieces of data remain, but the content of this data could be made more visible to make life a little easier.

There is no getting away from the fact that there is room for improvement with this app, but it's still a great utility. As it's open source software, it is available for anyone to tweak as they see fit, so it you have the skills you can get to working adding additional features.