Exif date formats

[karel1980]

I'm assuming that the dates are stored in text (because exiftool -CreateDate and exiftool -CreateDate# show the same result). Is that correct?

If so, then does anyone know why the dates are not stored in an ISO8601 format? e.g. 2011-01-03T10:11:12Z instead of 2011:01:03 10:11:12
The use of : to separate year/month/date looks rather weird.

[Phil Harvey]

The "numerical" date values are not necessarily what is stored in the file.  The "#" for date/time tags just disables the conversion specified by the -d option.

For consistency, ExifTool reads/writes all date/time values in EXIF format.

- Phil

Edit: I don't know why EXIF chose to use this format; and yes, it is a text format.  XMP uses ISO8601.