If I am to believe the strftime documentation (https://strftime.org/), if I have a non-offset-aware date/time stored for instance in the EXIF or XMP sections, I'd expect %z to not output anything in date formats.
In fact, the default format works that way:
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg -EXIF:CreateDate -s -s -s
2022:01:19 15:16:17
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg -EXIF:CreateDate -s -s -s -d '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S%z'
2022-01-19 15:16:17+0000
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg -XMP:CreateDate -s -s -s
2022:01:19 15:16:17+0300
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg -XMP:CreateDate -s -s -s -d '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S%z'
2022-01-19 15:16:17+0300
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg '-XMP:CreateDate=2022:01:19 15:16:17'
1 image files updated
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg -XMP:CreateDate -s -s -s
2022:01:19 15:16:17
user@computer:~$exiftool ~/Pictures/My-picture.jpg -XMP:CreateDate -s -s -s -d '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S%z'
2022-01-19 15:16:17+0000
I'd expect that second and last commands to have returned a string without timezone information.
I tried version 12.38 in both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 21.10 with the same results.
Is this by design?
Sorry for the delay in responding, but this question required a bit of research on my part because I had forgotten how this was done.
It turns out this is intentional. See Note number 2 here (https://exiftool.org/filename.html#codes).
- Phil
I was playing around with this and can't figure out how you got ExifTool to return a default-formatted timezone without a colon. I get this:
> exiftool a.jpg -xmp:createdate -s -s -s
2022:01:19 15:16:17+03:00
However, %z does return a time zone without a colon. I don't really like this inconsistency. Also, I see how it may be inconvenient that %z returns a time zone when the date/time didn't contain one.
I'm not sure of the best way to resolve these issues, or even whether they are important enough to spend more time on.
- Phil
Quote from: Phil Harvey on February 08, 2022, 08:52:24 AM
I was playing around with this and can't figure out how you got ExifTool to return a default-formatted timezone without a colon. I get this:
> exiftool a.jpg -xmp:createdate -s -s -s
2022:01:19 15:16:17+03:00
It's been a while sorry, but I think this might have been a copy/paste mistake by me when creating the post. I get a colon when I run the command now, both on my Windows and Linux machines.
Quote from: Phil Harvey on February 08, 2022, 08:52:24 AM
However, %z does return a time zone without a colon. I don't really like this inconsistency. Also, I see how it may be inconvenient that %z returns a time zone when the date/time didn't contain one.
I'm not sure of the best way to resolve these issues, or even whether they are important enough to spend more time on.
- Phil
Don't worry thanks for looking into it! I worked around the issue in the end