January 17, 2016 – Last weekend I noticed that the photos taken with my Samsung ST150F were one hour off from where they should have been. The time change getting off of Daylight Savings time was the cause. So all photos taken from November 1st to January 9th off one hour. I know this just looking at the photo file names as they are named by YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS. And looking at clocks in the photos and know what time I was a certain locations led me to the hour off discovery.
Most people don’t name their photos like I do, so there is no immediate problem. But I do name them as such and do use the name to later tell me more about the event, people or place being photographed. I also noticed that the meta info was an hour off. I also have to correct that too.
What To Do?
I do have programs which will change file names, even ones based on YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS. I have done it in the past for this very same reason, the unnecessary changing of the time by our government. But all my photos go through Lightroom and changing file names externally will cause Lightroom to show those files are unlocatable (with ?). I would then have to click on each photo, then reassign the corrected photo via a few dialog windows. Not much trouble if I were correcting just one or two photos, but most of my folders have at least 30 photos. Others as many as 167 photos. So I am forced to work from within Lightroom.
I did find that I could change all the meta information on “Capture Time” all at once. I change capture time to -1 hour and all is well with Capture Time info. But I still have to correct each photo one at a time.
It took an hour to change the photos taken with the Samsung to their correct file names and time values. At that time I did not check on the photos taken with my Canon SL1 because I was sure those photos were ok. But upon checking I found that camera also took photos which were now an hour off. I could swear that I checked my Canon SL1 camera right after the change in time and corrected the time change. I will have make sure this coming March and I will have to change for a few weeks thereafter just in case my camera changes the time on its own. This is a common problem for photographers. These cameras should be smart enough to allow for automatic time changes. What a pain it is to have to correct the file names and capture times.