Hi, I'm new here 
I've been reading the stickies (like you do) and in Robin2's helpful topic on inserting images I saw that the forum software may reject any with EXIF (and perhaps other?) metadata.
A quick and easy way to remove such data is with this simple and free tool, which I've been using for years now.
JPEG and PNG Stripper from Steel Bytes
I have no affiliation or relationship with this software, I just like it and find it very useful
I would appreciate any comments other people have. This seems to be a Windows program and I only use Linux.
...R
it is indeed Windows only, which I should probably have mentioned - Sorry about that.
Linux users (or at least those who use the CLI) could use exiftool
It's provided in perl-Image-ExifTool on CentOS 7 ('yum install perl-Image-ExifTool') but I think that Debian and derivatives might call it something else.
exiftool -all= myFile.jpg
There's also jpegtran, part of libjpeg-turbo-utils (on CentOS).
jpegtran -copy none -outfile destFile.jpg inFile.jpg
I don't know about GUIs, sorry (all my Linux boxes are headless), but someone may have made a wrapper for those.
I just use GIMP either to make a PNG copy of a JPG or to make a new image from part of the JPG - which when saved as a JPG does not have Exif data.
...R
Photoshop's not like that, unfortunately - Even when saving a new image it dumps all sorts of metadata on the end of most files, which is why I've been using Stripper for a few years now.
I've been using GIMP to open pictures made with my camera or phone and export it as PNG.
This will have that data stripped
I might do some cropping or highlight parts of the image too, but nothing else.
Works like a charm, it's an open source software and much more powerful than i've needed yet.