Adjusting Dates and Time Zones

[tstoddard]

I just returned from a trip to Italy and have lots of photos to ingest. I neglected to change the time on my camera before I started shooting over there so I decided just to leave the times as is and make adjustments later. I want to make sure I do it the correct way.

The time on my camera was technically correct, in other words, the times are accurate but they were times in the US Eastern time zone at the time I took the pictures. There is a 6 hour difference between here and Italy.

I see that there is a "Date Image" option in the Batch panel that I should be able to use to make the desired changes but I'm not certain about exactly how to use it and I don't want to change all of my dates and then realize that I did something wrong.

I assume that I want to adjust base dates, date time original, and date time digitized. Is that correct? Also, under the "Change Time zone" option, it says "New time zone" and then has a field for hours and another field for minutes. If I set the Hours field to +1 will that put me in the correct time zone for Italy or will that change the time zone on the originals to 1 hour greater than it had been. More specifically, the current photos show the time zone as -5 gmt (Eastern US time zone). Italy's time zone is +1 gmt. If I check the "Change Time zone" check box and put +1 in the hours field next to "New time zone" what will I end up with?

Finally, the file date. Is that date going to be the date that the file is imported onto my hard drive? If so, then I don't need to change that date. Is that correct?

[Hert]

Hi Tom,

1. Select a few images
2. right click on a selected thumbnail -> Operations -> Redate Files... (Ctrl+Shift+D)
3. Mark to change all dates
4. Set "Change Date To" to "Shift Dates"
5. Shift them with the needed difference (+6 hours I assume)
6. Check "Change Time Zone"
7. Set the Time Zone to +1 hours and 0 minutes

[DirkS]

I don't want to change all of my dates and then realize that I did something wrong.

Best advice here: copy some images in a separate directory and use these to test the changes on.

Finally, the file date. Is that date going to be the date that the file is imported onto my hard drive? If so, then I don't need to change that date. Is that correct?

If metadata is written to the file itself then of course it will change every time you change that metadata. File date is fairly irrelevant; depending on your OS and HD file system it can actually change when you copy / move images.

7. Set the Time Zone to +1 hours and 0 minutes

Shouldn't that be +2 because of the summer time in Italy? That's how my images are dated when I activate summer time on my camera.

Gr.
Dirk.

[tstoddard]

IDimager wrote:7. Set the Time Zone to +1 hours and 0 minutes


Shouldn't that be +2 because of the summer time in Italy? That's how my images are dated when I activate summer time on my camera.

Dirk, you are right about summer time but when expressing a time zone, I don't believe that it is normal to account for "day-light savings". Perhaps I'm wrong but when I look at my camera settings, my time zone says UTC-5 and my "Day-light Savings" is set to "On". The camera adjusts the time accordingly. Since I'll be setting the times to the correct "Summer time" in Italy, all that the time zone will do is tell me what time zone I was in. It won't change the times.

If my logic is incorrect, please let me know. This is an interesting query.

Thanks!

EDIT: I appear to be wrong. When I look at the times in the detail panel in PSU, the time zone part is expressed as GMT and it is adjusted for Day-light Savings. I am in the UTC-5 time zone but the times on photos I've taken in the summer say -4 GMT. Thanks again for pointing this out.