JPEG Cleaner - Program to reduce JPEG file sizes

Since I moved to broadband internet I've become less dedicated to image file sizes. That changed when I noticed that many files were coming out much larger than I expected from my image editing software... preview functions might say an image would be 9kb and then the file might come out at 18kb!

After searching for information about this, I realized that the extra data was information my digital cameras had appended to JPEGs... for example, all camera settings like shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc., were stored with the JPEGs. That information could add up.

I found a utility that will clean this information from JPEGs. It's called the JPG Cleaner, a free program produced by Rainbow Software. It's a very simple and useful utility to optimize images for the web. Sometimes the extra non-image data in your JPEG is larger than the image information!

I find the extra information useful for my hi-res photo collection. But when posting to the web, it's a good idea to delete the extra, unused data.