The accuracy of effective chiral lagrangians with vector-mesons as (hidden symmetry) gauge fields is shown to be improved by including SU(3)-breaking in the vector-meson sector. The masses (M V ), couplings to the photon field (f V γ ) and pseudoscalar pairs (g V P P ) are all consistently described in terms of two parameters, which also fit the values for the pseudoscalar decay-constants, f P , and charge radii, r 2 P . The description of the latter is further improved when working in the context of chiral perturbation theory.