How Photos Handles Time Zones when Importing Photos

This user Tip has been updated and moved to How Photos Handles Time Zones when Importing Photos in Photos 5 on Catalina - Apple Community (June 19, 2020)

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Occasionally photos may be sorted in an unexpected way in Photos, when we sort them by the capture date. This can happen, if Photos assigned a wrong time zone to the capture time of the photos, because it did not read the time zone set in the camera.If photos are apparently sorted incorrectly by time, check the time zones for the photos, that are out of order. The Info panel does not show the time zones, just the time in hours and minutes and seconds, because it uses the "Medium" date format. But you can see the time zone used by Photos at the bottom of the panel "Image > Adjust date and time".

Photos is trying to infer the proper time zone, when you import photos, because the EXIF capture date does not have a time zone assigned.If a photo has GPS (iPhone photos), Photos may interpret the capture date relative to the GPS time zone.If no GPS is present, Photos may use the time zone of the current system time, when you import the photos to Photos. So dates will be read differently, shifted by several hours, if you import photos at home or if you import them while being still in the time zone, where the photos have been taken.

For the photos, that are not sorted correctly, adjust the timezone to the timezone of the other photos. You can do that by changing the menu at the bottom of "Image > Adjust date and time" to another "closest city". If you switch to a different time zone, the capture date may be shifted by photos. If that happens, change the hour back to the hour you are seeing in "Original Time".

For example: If your camera has been set to the local time of New Zealand, but you import the photos at home, and the closest city shown is your home town, change the closest city, but ensure that the two dates shown, Original and Adjusted, will remain the same:

This can be done for a batch of photos at once. If you have used more than one camera, you may want to split your photos into two smart albums - for example, one album for the photos taken with the iPhone and one photo for the photos taken with a DSRL camera. This way you can select easily a range of photos for just one camera to fix the time zone for all of them at once.

If you did not always have a good GPS signal reception, for example, if some photos have been taken inside a building, you may also create smart albums, that wills group Photos according to GPS assigned or not, because a poor GPS signal and missing location may cause the time zone to change.

What can make this procedure sometimes difficult is, that it is hard to keep track of when we changed the time zones in the camera. We may not be noticing, when we are crossing a border, if it is not marked and may still be using the previous time zone while the GPS is already showing the new time zone. Or an iPhone may not be able to connect to a time server when crossing the border and change the clock too late. I am always taking a picture of my wrist watch, when I change the time in my camera, so I can compare the time on the clock face to the EXIF capture date of the photo of the clock face and have a reference of the current time zone offset.

Another difficulty: For some cameras we may get different results for the time zones, depending on the method of import, whether we import directly from the camera or are using a card reader and the card is no longer in the camera. I am always using the card reader to avoid this complication. It is tempting to change the system Preferences > Language & Region to show the medium date with a time zone suffix. Then Photos will show all dates and time with a time zone, but is lying to us. The Info panel will just show our local time zone, not the time zone used by Photos to interpret the date and time. This has changed in Photos 5 on Catalina. If we change the medium date format to include the time zone, we can see in the info the time zone for the capture time.

This user tip was generated from the following discussion: Which date is used to sort photos?