travel - What do you do with your camera clock time in relation to time zones?

I live in the UK and spend most of my time here, apart from a short trip abroad once or sometimes twice a year.

This Sunday just gone we switched from GMT to BST, so our clocks went forward one hour. I updated my camera clock to match the new time, which is something I do every time the clocks change but someone said to me that this was a bad idea and that I should just leave it on GMT/UTC all year around. I guess this is partly due to GPS tracking (although I would normally use my iPhone which automatically updates it's time, so I need to sync my camera with my phone before I begin ideally).

I like the idea of updating my camera so it's on local time wherever I am in the world, but of course there is always the possibility of forgetting to do this. In the summer we are off on Honeymoon and will be in several different time zones, so the question is should I just make an effort to remember to update my clock time as I go, should I just leave it on GMT/UTC or is there a better way?

I am genuinely interested in what other photographers do to tackle this issue, especially with regard to travel and spending a few days at a time in different time zones.

I would also like to know how people handle the metadata when posting images online as the metadata could indicate a photo was taken on a different day due to a time zone mismatch. Also when reviewing photos I think it is often useful to know the times they were taken, especially with regard to sunset and sunrise, so knowing the accurate time can be important. Do you just have to manually work it out or is there considered to be a 'best practice' approach to dealing with this.

Very much looking forward to reading your responses.

Answer

I like to have date and times on photos reflect local times and date at the location. Unlike another respondent, I like to be able to search for a photo taken "at about 3pm on the Thursday afternoon when I was in Xian" and, while there are other ways of cataloguing and ordering, being able to search on local date and time is a bonus.

Travel from NZ involves long international flights (8-12 hours typical range unless going to Europe.)

I (try to remember to) change the camera date on the flight and change my wristwatch at the same time and take a before and after photo of the watch sequentially so I have a visual reference to the actual time of change in the photo stream.

Outbound from NZ the camera steps back in time so some photos will be out of time/date order. Making the change early in the flight minimises the impact if I care. e.g. China is 5 hours behind NZ and is ~ 8-10-12 hours flight time (Hong-Kong / Shanghai / Beijing) depending also on route so the time impact on photo date-sort order is usually minimal.

In the past I used to assign a long file name prefix based on properly time ordered date. Effectively YY MM DD HH SS in compressed form. It was useful but not so much so that I kept it going.

Related:

Fixing corrupted file date & time: Due to Microsoft's cavalier handling of file date & time format when copying from cameras to hard drives you can find time offset by 12 hours and date by one day or both, on occasion. Confusing day and month is another sometime Microsoft speciality due to NZ using ddmmyy format as opposed to the usual US mmddyy format. Use of an EXIF to file date-time copying program fixes this. I use the excellent free jhead program to do this. Running jhead -ft *%1*.jpg in a [gasp!] DOS batch file will correct the date time to that shown in the EXIF for all files in a "folder". I believe that Microsoft Powertoys synch manager does this too but I have never tried it.

Travelling backup: I use the venerable and marvellous XXCOPY to incrementally copy in files from camera card to a netbook. When in tourist mode I carry the netbook everywhere and may download from camera card several times during the day. [Just because you are excessively paranoid about data loss it doesn't mean your cards won't fail :-)]. When XXCOPYing I change the archive attribute bit in the process, so that uncopied files can be identified, thus allowing an only-new files download incrementally AND leaving a backup copy on the camera card. I then copy from netbook to portable hard drive (possibly also during he day) and only then, if required, delete files on camera card. [On one journey I lost two of my 3 copies of photos (vanished with no clues, probably stolen) and still lost no photos.