I noticed that the pictures I export via Photolab show incorrect time taken in Photoshop Elements Organiser. A picture taken at 15:30, shows 18:30. Right clicking on the file in the explorer and going to details ‘date take’ still shows 15:30. Upon inspecting the issue I realised that Photolab assigns a metadata called “offset time”. Is there any way I can stop this from happening?
Welcome to the wonderful world of time zone handling.
My previous camera had settings where I could set my home city and a destination city and easily flip between them. I thought this meant the timezone would be written into the files, but in fact all it did was offset the camera’s internal clock automatically.
My current camera has no such settings. You just set the time to whatever suits and that’s what gets recorded.
Same manufacturer!
So neither of mine even record an offset time. Then I add these photos into Apple Photos alongside ones taken on my iPhone. This does know the timezone. Do you think I can get everything to sort into the order I actually took them? I cannot. I still don’t understand why.
I also happen to be a developer of sorts and the only practical approach is if everything records time in UTC and only converts to a local timezone for display. Unfortunately, this is, apparently, an unobtainable utopia. Despite it being a very old idea. (I used a computer in the 1990s that followed this approach in the operating system.)
Sorry, it’s not all that helpful, except perhaps to let you throw up your arms and not try to fight it any more. Because just when you think you’ve won, another piece of software will come along and ruin it again with different behaviours.
I still don’t know what I’ve to set next to the time zone, the local time or the UTC time. In the first case the UTC time will be calculated, In the second case the local time will be calculated. Since I’m mostly in one timezone it doesn’t boarder me.
What camera do you use?
George
Since I have already dealt with the topic a bit, I can contribute some information, but I’m not an expert.
First of all, I would definitely check what is set for UTC (OffsetTime, GTM) in the camera settings, as already mentioned. In my camera (Fuji XT-3), there is a setting for DATE/TIME in the user settings, and a “TIME DIFFERENCE” setting where I can choose “Home” or “Local.” For “Home,” there is no further setting; for “Local,” I can set the deviation from the standard GMT time, i.e., from UTC = Offset Time.
If I have set DATE/TIME to my local time here in Germany and select “HOME” for the time zone, the Offset Time in my RAW files is +0. So basically everything is correct, and it should be processed further in the editing software (during export). Local is intended for travel when I am no longer in the time zone I set under DATE/TIME, for example, in India. It may be that in your camera it shows +3 hours here. Unfortunately, it happens to me repeatedly that I forget to reset it (more on that later).
The question now is: what Offset Time does your RAW file have? If you have the app “XNView MP,” you can easily find out the Offset Time via ExifTool. If the RAW file shows +0 hours and the JPG file shows +3 hours after exporting, then PL could be the cause. To my knowledge, however, there is no setting for PL. Then it could possibly be a bug that should be reported to DxO. Did you enable “Exif” under Metadata during export?
If the RAW file already has an Offset Time of +3 hours, it is to be suspected that there is a wrong setting in your camera.
Or Photoshop Elements adds an Offset Time of 3 hours to the files because it is misconfigured. Just a guess; I don’t know the program. But this possibility actually exists: for me, Topaz Photo AI sometimes changes the Offset Time.
That’s a lot to narrow down the problem.
As far as I know - please correct me if I’m wrong - the Offset Time in the RAW file cannot be changed, so I looked for a solution that resets this Offset Time back to 0:00 in (exported) JPGs with the wrong Offset Time. For this, I use ExifTool by Phil Harvey and the ability on my Mac to execute the necessary commands (a shell script) via an app (Automator). The script simply sets the Offset Time to 0:00 for all files that are called with the app. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there is a comparable solution for Windows.
If you don’t want to deal with the ExifTool syntax, use ChatGPT: it will write you all the desired commands in the correct syntax, not always perfectly, but after a few iterations usually correctly.
I hope this helps a little.
Martin
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@zkarj @George @fishmi
Thank you all for your help. I never had any trouble with this in the past. I reason I first encountered it now is because I used both PhotoLab and Capture One for a batch of photos from a single trip. Apparently the exports from PhotoLab carry the offset time, whereas those from Capture One don’t. Had the picture been in the right time order (regardless of whether time was off by 3 hours or not) I wouldn’t have noticed.
As I didn’t want to dive into ExifTool, I exported the pictures I edited in PhotoLab as tiff, I imported them in Capture One, and then I re-exported them as jpegs. Problem solved 
I think I’ll set all my cameras to GMT +0 so as not to have to deal with this again!
But it’s weird. When I set the time to, say, 15:00 GMT +2, this shouldn’t mean that It’s 17:00 in my location…
As I said, it’s the only real solution. The trouble you have then, however, is if you actually want to know what time of day a photo was taken, you need to be sure of where it was taken and also the date (because of daylight time).
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