first: xnview became the imagebrowser of my choice, after acdsee turned more and more dumb... and btw lightroom is not a serious opponent: its way to slow and unhandy, plus its very limited on formats.
so.
i'm still looking for a lossless (and fast) solution for my fotos providing metadata. since i'm still working a lot with film and get the pics scanned as bmp raw is not a choice.
jpeg2000 seems to be a modern and reasonable lossless solution containing metadata. so what about writing metadata in jp2? big deal? is there iptc an option for jp2?
how about editing and creating iptc in tiff, this would be fine, too.
metadata-editing for either jp2 or tif would be the first on my whishlist. any alternatives?
and last but not least, 'cause there's digital cameras, iptc writing for raw (pef, if possible

keep up the good work! nïkö