My recent travel photos all have the correct date and time - I had to fix some. However, a handful won't sort in proper Date Taken order in Google Photos. From exiftool, it looks like those are the ones with an entry (like +01:00) in the "offsettime." (It's funny but those are from my wife's iPhone - not all of them but just a handful.) I'll bet if I got rid of the +01:00s they would sort correctly. How would I do that? Thanks.
You could use
exiftool -offsettime*= /path/to/files/
You don't mention your OS, but you probably need to put quotes around -offsettime*= on Mac/Linux.
Thanks for rapid response. Windows 11. The *= does what exactly?
From the docs (https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html#TAG---VALUE)
QuoteThe wildcard characters ? and * may be used in a tag name to match any single character and zero or more characters respectively
There are three
OffsetTime tags. Using a wildcard takes care of all three at once.
iOS 15.5 or later does not have GPSTimeStamp anymore. That info is moved to OffsetTime*
exiftool -a -G1 -s -time:all 2023-0820-2000-27.jpg
[IFD0] ModifyDate : 2023:08:20 20:00:27
[ExifIFD] DateTimeOriginal : 2023:08:20 20:00:27
[ExifIFD] CreateDate : 2023:08:20 20:00:27
[ExifIFD] OffsetTime : +03:00
[ExifIFD] OffsetTimeOriginal : +03:00
[ExifIFD] OffsetTimeDigitized : +03:00
[ExifIFD] SubSecTimeOriginal : 503
[ExifIFD] SubSecTimeDigitized : 503
[GPS] GPSDateStamp : 2023:08:20
I have had no trouble with that, but have not yet tested how Google Photos handles it. macOS 13 Photos.app sets the timezone based on that, or based on GPS location if there is no offset, or as a last resort based on computer's timezone setting.
- Matti
Great and helpful responses, thank you all! Will try now. One other thing - apparently this tag is not accessible from Windows Explorer, correct?
Next problem: I'm seeing photos show for example "GMT -05:00". This comes from the fact that I forgot to change the time zone on my camera before travelling. (I was able to fix all the times to put things in order in Windows Explorer.) But the time zone is screwing things up in Google Photos sorting. So what I want now is to set the TZ to 0 yet leave the time stamp the same.
Skip this request. I was able to go into Google Photos and adjust time and zone to force things into the right order. Moral is to remember to adjust camera date and zone when you get to a new location!