How to strip metadata from documents before sharing them Leave feedback

Sending a document outside the company sends its metadata too. This is the pass that prevents the familiar incident — a tender document arriving with a competitor’s name in the Company field.

Note

The commands and config snippets on this page are for the .NET build of the server — the only platform available today. Installation and client setup: MCP server for .NET. Other platforms will expose the same tools with their own launch command; everything else on this page applies unchanged.

Strip all metadata from the files in my documents folder and tell me what you removed.

remove_metadata with no categories removes everything removable and writes a cleaned copy per file. Ask for the summary in the same breath so you can see what was there.

Sometimes the dates or the title must survive:

Remove the author and company fields but keep the title and dates. Strip only the EXIF from these photos — leave the document properties alone.

Pass the categories rather than clearing everything; the agent maps your words to them.

A cleanup you cannot describe is not an audit trail. The stronger order:

1. read_metadata — capture what was there.
2. remove_metadata — produce the cleaned copy.
3. read_metadata on the cleaned file — confirm what remains.

Step 3 is the one people skip, and it is the one that turns “I think it is clean” into “here is the before and after”.

• The original still exists, with everything in it. The tool writes a new file; sharing the wrong one defeats the exercise. Make the agent name the file it produced.
• Not everything is metadata. Tracked changes, comments, embedded objects, and earlier revisions live in the document body. For comments and annotations use the GroupDocs.Annotation MCP server; for content-level redaction, GroupDocs.Redaction.
• Evaluation mode cannot be trusted for this. With only the first five properties readable and writable, “everything removed” is not a claim the unlicensed engine can honestly make. get_license_status first.

Before I send anything from this folder: read the metadata, strip it, verify the copy is clean, and give me a one-line report per file.

That is four tool calls per file and a table at the end — the kind of routine an agent is genuinely good at, and a person reliably forgets.