Date and Time stamp affected by Time Zone adjustment

Atomic Aardvark

I am a relatively new user and have found the software easy to use and learn. A number of photo’s in my archive were originally shot on film and therefore do not have an accurate date and time setting associated with them. I have been using the Set date function to rectify this, and as many were shot while traveling I have set the time zone of where the photo’s were taken to help keep my overall time line accurate. Something that I have noticed however is that the time details (Date & Time) displayed in the File Information area does not match what was updated. In fact it is adjusted by the difference in the set time and the actual time zone I am in. This seems to be flawed logic to me. The information area is supposed to provide easy understandable data on when the file was captured, not corrected for the time zone you return to. May I suggest that the logic is changed to display the actual capture time and date and have the time zone as a additional field. Ideally this time zone will also be picked up from the GPS location provided rather than having to adjust the time zone for every file individually.

Andrey

Atomic Aardvark In fact it is adjusted by the difference in the set time and the actual time zone I am in.

That is correct. This is intentional.

Atomic Aardvark May I suggest that the logic is changed to display the actual capture time and date and have the time zone as a additional field.

Thank you for suggestion. However, there are reasons behind current decision. First, this is not that obvious to me that timezone should not be your current. I am sure there are people that would prefer current aproach.

Second, timezone information can be unreliable, if present at all. By far not all cameras are stroing this information. By the way, GPS does not provide any time zone informaton, just location and UTC time. And conversion from location to time zone is not trivial task at all. It would requre detailed database of borders of all states and all regions of the states, including all changes for past several decades, and there were a lot of changes, let alone there so many disputed locations. And not just borders, govermnemts seems to like to shuffle time zones around from time to time. This task is definitely too complex to be “just another small feature”.

Anyway, I am very interested to hear what other users think on what is best - local time or “home” time.

Atomic Aardvark

Thank you for the response Andrey. Maybe you can clarify what the logic is to adjust the date and time in the way it is applied now, as to me it doesn’t make any sense. The effect of the current adjustment is that when you view images in the “Events” view images that should be clustered together are split up in to separate events. This is especially true when the time zone differences are very large. As an example, I have images taken in Africa which is 9 to 10 hours time difference from Australia where I live. Any image taken in late afternoon or night are pushed to the next day with the current approach. Would love to hear others view on this, but to me this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense the way it is implemented currently.

Andrey

Atomic Aardvark The effect of the current adjustment is that when you view images in the “Events” view images that should be clustered together are split up in to separate events.

Events clustering is completely separate issue, it is not connected at all to the way we display date in File Info panel.

Photos will be put in the same event if they were taken relatively close in space and in time. With that said, it is by design that Photos from Africa will never be in the same event with photos from Australia, even if those were shoot at the same exact moment. I would love to hear your arguments why it does not make sense.

As to “pushing to the next day” - this is not related to time zone at all. Photos grouping in time is not bound to 00:00 in any time zone. Event can easily span from late evening one day to early morning next day, if they are close enough to each other (like within 6 hours).