To Support Time Zone in Photos

Ideas for improvements and requests for new features in XnView Classic

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anmin
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2012 2:35 am

To Support Time Zone in Photos

Post by anmin »

For photos taken traveling across time zones in a trip (but forgetting to set correct time zone on the camera, if auto time zone setting is not available),
allowing users to adjust time zone of timestamp is super helpful.
And, also, it is super annoying to see photos taken earlier listed behind those taken later when sorted by taken time if traveling westward across time zones, or eastward across IDL. And to sync photos time order amongst photos taken by friends, who may set camera time zone differently (or auto time zone setting not/available on their cameras) in the same trip.

Metadata of "XMP" supports time zone, and UTC time in "EXIF: GPS block" may derive time zone from, and EXIF since version 2.31 in 2016 also supports time zone.

. To consider time zone while "sorting by date/time", if time zone info is available or can be derived (in file properties, or photo metadata: XMP, EXIF GPS block, EXIF 2.31 or later, etc).

. Suggesting to add "time zone setting" in "Change Timestamp" "Use" block with "specific date and time" and "from other time property, with offset".
If time zone info not available, adding it into photo metadata or file properties; if available, allowing to edit it. We can select "unchanged", "none" (clear if existed), and a specific new time zone offset.
See attached demo image for concepts.
Image

Here also attaches crops of some snapshots of another application named "GeoSetter" in action. We noticed that not all the timestamps time zone were changed properly in this demo. (home PC and camera setting as TZ+8 and travel to TZ-7, where photo time zone +8 changed to time zone -7 in the demo, an "XMP" metadata, which was not existed, is inserted to the original photo file in this demo). I'd guess that the behavior of "16:00 TZ+8" changed to "16:00 TZ-7", with timestamp adjust offset 0, is not very appropriate. It is better to change to "01:00 TZ-7" as the same UTC time but in different time zones for the purpose.
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jmoliver
Posts: 17
Joined: Wed Jun 19, 2019 1:51 pm
Location: Puerto Rico

Re: To Support Time Zone in Photos

Post by jmoliver »

This would be quite helpful. The newer EXIF specification addresses time zone. I recently noticed that my smart phone camera app (Google Pixel 3) adds time zone info to those fields:

0x9010 OffsetTime string ExifIFD (time zone for ModifyDate)
0x9011 OffsetTimeOriginal string ExifIFD (time zone for DateTimeOriginal)
0x9012 OffsetTimeDigitized string ExifIFD (time zone for CreateDate)

Reference: https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/ex ... /EXIF.html

GeoSetter has an interesting UI for handling timezones, it can also fetch the correct timezone using the lat/long coordinates and timestamp from the photo (for daylight savings). There are some services out there which do the same: Example: https://developers.google.com/maps/docu ... zone/intro