Hi Schmidtze,

The -L option only applies to the external character set, not to how it is saved in the file. XMP is always saved as UTF8, and the IPTC encoding is determined by the value of the CodedCharacterSet tag.

The thing to do is to pass all strings to exiftool as UTF8, and let it handle the encoding. You use the -L option if you want to pass Latin1 strings to exiftool, but the result stored in the file will be the same since exiftool handles the encoding when writing to the file.

I hope this makes sense.

- Phil