V3 deterministic metadata capability pack. By-value connector composition (service_kind=cli, no separate ingredient): one local ExifTool CLI ingredient exposes readiness, tag/deletable-group discovery, embedded metadata extraction, and metadata-stripped-copy operations. Fixed-function and reproducible: extraction and stripping happen locally before any model sees source bytes. File-ref operations write only to an engine-managed throwaway output dir and capture result.file_ref; downstream ai-* steps consume the JSON or stripped copy through a Gateway-gated file ref. The source can be a data.file ref or a trusted local path. No shell wrapper, arbitrary ExifTool flags, recursive directory processing, remote fetch, caller-controlled output path, in-place mutation, or backup deletion is exposed. Requires the exiftool binary on PATH (Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libimage-exiftool-perl; macOS: brew install exiftool). Local and no-egress; ExifTool parses many file formats, so prefer file_ref sources and keep the parser stack patched. PDF metadata edits are reversible in ExifTool alone, so use a PDF rebuild/linearize step before treating a PDF copy as securely scrubbed.