Reasons not to use three letter country code?

[obetz]

Hi all,

would you mind to share your current opinion on which country code to be used?

The old IPTC-IIM standard required 3 (three) letter ISO country code.

I found postings that Adobe defaults to two letter codes in Lightroom and Photoshop. Is this correct?

Newer IPTC documents allow two or three letter codes.

This puts the burden on client software to find both versions for search or filtering.

Rather stupid...

Oliver

[Phil Harvey]

Which one to use really depends on the software you use and what it expects.  I can't speak for that.

The newer specifications just state ISO 3166 without specifying which set.  ISO 3166 has 2- and 3-character alpha codes as well as a 3-digit numeric code.

Personally I would go with 2-character codes.

- Phil

[Alan Clifford]

I put 2 letter codes in my photos.  GB for UK, you know it makes sense!

[obetz]

I put 2 letter codes in my photos.  GB for UK, you know it makes sense!

Correct, UK is not a ISO 3166-1 country code but just reserved. Easy to confuse with the tld.

Oliver

[Alan Clifford]

I put 2 letter codes in my photos.  GB for UK, you know it makes sense!

Correct, UK is not a ISO 3166-1 country code but just reserved. Easy to confuse with the tld.

Oliver

I was, perhaps rather abstrusely, alluding to the fact that Great Britain is only a part of the United Kingdom.

[obetz]

it crossed my mind <g>.

At present I hope that the Kingdom gets as United as it was before 2016.

[sevy]

Hello,

I used 3 letters country code (even if I find 2 letters more easy) for the following reason : when I started to add metadata to pictures, I used Geosetter.
With this program (at this time), when adding the country, the country code with 3 letters were automatically added.
After, I started to learn Exiftool (a never ending process :-). It seems more convenient and logic to continue to add the 3 letters country code rather than to change to 2 letters code.

[StarGeek]

I use 3 character code because I still sync IPTC and XMP data and try to avoid warnings whenever possible and the IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationCode issues a warning when it's only 2 characters.  And pretty much the only reason I bother adding the Country code is because I took the time to create a config file that will return the country code based upon the country tag.  Otherwise, I feel it's a relatively useless tag as you probably have the full country name already and that tag is more informative and easier to read.