Kleaner For Linux

Sharing photos online can have serious repercussions, and it's all thanks to something called image metadata. Photo metadata (most commonly referred to EXIF - Exchangeable Image File Format) can expose a lot of personal and what should be private information.

Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to remove photo metadata, from solutions that are straight-up inefficient (like removing the metadata manually from your pictures one by one) to some that are quite the opposite (like specialized tools that are capable of removing metadata from tons of photos with a few clicks).

Kleaner is one of the latter, a small utility that's designed to help you remove metadata from your images and photos as swiftly as possible.

Let's start with the upsides. Kleaner is a free and open-source Linux desktop app. It's also quite fast, very responsive, and surprisingly lightweight.

It can handle pretty much all types of metadata-related content such as EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and Comments. Better yet, it's capable of removing all metadata from a high amount of pictures in mere seconds.

If you're looking for a small image metadata remover for Linux and you're not particularly picky about features, then yes, it may just be perfect for you. However, please note that it's not perfect. It's somewhat limited by the formats that it supports (which aren't that many, to be honest), but at least PNG and JPG are supported.

What I found a bit annoying about this app is the fact that it forces you into its default templates. Thankfully, custom user templates is a feature that's currently in the works, and it should make this app a lot more usable than it already is.

Kleaner is by no means the best image metadata cleaner out there, but it's also not the worst. It's a nicely put-together app, despite its size, its non-impressive GUI, and the fact that it lacks a few essential customization options.

Still, it gets the job done, and it's very fast and precise.