Adjust time zone in Photos without adjusting time

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Level 1

4 points

Adjust time zone in Photos without adjusting time

Hello - I have thousands of photos in my Photos app and I'm attempting to find and delete duplicates. During this process, I was seeing duplicate photos with identical date/time stamps not sorted next to each other which makes it hard to find duplicates. Apparently, Photos has some pictures tagged as EST or GMT-5 and others tagged PST. Mind you, these are duplicate photos. Not sure why it would do this, however, when I try to change them to the correct time zone, the time is adjusted as well, which defeats the purpose. How can I adjust the time zone and leave the time as is.

Posted on Oct 6, 2022 7:51 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

194,519 points

Oct 6, 2022 8:49 AM in response to BooshySwoon

When you switch the time zone, the time displayed will be converted to that time zone, the sorting according to the capture date will remain the same. To shift the time by the Time zone offset, change not only the time zone, but set the time in the field "Adjusted" immediately back to the same time as "Original". Only then click "Adjusted".

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Answer 2

BooshySwoon Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 6, 2022 9:06 AM in response to léonie

Thanks for the reply. I just tested and learned that I can select many photos and do as you suggested and though it shows a single date/time, the system will not adjust all photos to the displayed date/time but apply the offset to each photo keeping the original date/time. That works!

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Answer 3

BooshySwoon Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 7, 2022 10:06 AM in response to léonie

So the problem is now in efficiency. Here's the situation: Let's say I have a bunch of photos from the east coast. The Date/Time stamp on all of them are correct but for some reason half have the EST time zone and half have the PST time zone.

What I want: to change all time zones to EST and keep date/time stamps the same.

I select all of the images and click to adjust date/time. Let's say the adjust date/time dialog shows the PST time zone (since the first images selected is PST), I then change the time zone to EST and change the date/time to stay as is (ignore the 3 hour time difference since I don't want timestamps to change).

Result: the system changes all timezones to EST (Good) and all timestamps to PST (Bad); so the result is that PST timestamps stay the same (correct) but the EST timestamps shift by 3 hours (incorrect)

To correctly do this, I have go through my images, one by one, to find the PST time zone images and adjust their time zones only. It's very tedious as there is no time zone filter. The only efficiency gain I get is if I find some PST images grouped together and I can do that subset all at once.

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

194,519 points

Oct 6, 2022 10:38 AM in response to BooshySwoon

Yes, I am doing it all the time, whenever I am importing photos to Photos, an d are no longer in the timezone where the photos have been taken it is necessary to correct the time this way.

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Adjust time zone in Photos without adjusting time

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