How Does Everyone Manages Timezones and Offset Time?

[JEXIF]

I have been using Apple Photos and iPhone for many years but slowly moving to Windows with Lightroom and other software. I must admit timezones drive me crazy especially when the time zone is wrong.

I am just fixing my GoPro video capture times.

How does everyone deal with timezones?

My iPhone photos are showing Offset time as +02:00 and they are not matching when my GoPro videos where taken on the same day.

Is it worth just removing time zones on all my photos? Has anyone had any experiences of doing this?

[Phil Harvey]

When you say "not matching", do you mean in the ExifTool output, or some other software?

For videos, if the camera knows the time zone then some date/time values will be stored as UTC.  With ExifTool, for these you can add -api quicktimeutc to your command so they are adjusted back to the current time zone.

- Phil

[JEXIF]

Any software that uses time zone like Apple Photos will show photos from other cameras to iPhone out of order as Apple add or remove hours depending on the timezone. I do not believe Lightroom uses timezone from what I can see.

When I view a photo from iPhone in exiftool under ExifIFD it has +02:00 for OffsetTime, OffsetTimeOriginal, OffsetTimeDigitized

Under IPTC it also shows:

TimeCreated  13:29:01+02:00

Is this the field for the time zone? I am just wondering how other mange their collection? Is ti easier to remove the time zone?

[StarGeek]

Is this the field for the time zone? I am just wondering how other mange their collection?

The OffsetTime* tags are the tags that hold the time zone. The IPTC tag is part of the older IPTC standard and that tag must include a time zone.

I go out of my way to make sure the time zone is correct in my images, as, IMO, it is better in the long run to have all the data in the file.

Is ti easier to remove the time zone?

This is a question only you can answer, as it depends on the programs you are using and how you want them to display the images.

[wywh]

We might better understand the issue if you have two images/movies that are shot about the same time (a few minutes apart), but are displayed ±1 hour or more apart in the viewer. Then post the output of the following command:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -a -G1 -s -n -api QuickTimeUTC=1 -Time:All -GPSPosition .
- Matti

[JEXIF]

I am thinking if you do not know about timezones it would be hard to explain. Many cameras and smart phones offset the hours so the time is correct in a particular time zone. One photo in the UK at 12:00 will have a different time zone in the exif information than an image taken at 12:00 in New York. Both show the time as 12:00 but they will show at different times in many programs like Apple Photos (as technically they are different times).

I was just wondering how others manage their collection but if you do not know what I mean or had experience managing this then it is fine. For now I am just making sure all my photos and videos show correctly in Lightroom as time zones are not used in this software so the order will display correctly. I am moving away from Apple Photos as this issue is a nightmare to deal with if you travel a lot to different countries. I am wondering whether just to delete the timezones fields if I can figure out what they are and how they work

[Martin B.]

> I was just wondering how others manage their collection

I rename all my photos and videos to have a name in this format: YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS.xxx, or with an optional counter at the end if there are multiple photos in the same second, like this: YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS_n.xxx.

This way, the photo order doesn't depend on the software; it's numerical. It's also fast because the software doesn't need to open each file to read the metadata.

I use the time in the timezone where the photo/video was taken, because that's what makes sense to me.

I do the renaming before importing into Lightroom.