Thanks. My ultimate aim is to have IPTC data written to an image file in utf8.

I have been tried out most of what is out there including the good freebies like Irfanview and Xnview to Photoshop CS4 and AcdSee Pro 2. Only Photoshop and Bridge write in UTF8 but strangely the file is not signed "Exiftool -codedCharacterSet FILE" does not return a value.

I was hoping that I could find a way for Exiftool to rewrite existing Latin1 encoded data to UTF8 and then sign the file as UTF8 - all in batch mode - but I am probably dreaming...