How is the shooting time recorded in the photo file?

Question

JPEG

The photo stores such a parameter as the date of shooting. Suppose I took a picture in Moscow (GMT+3). My friend took a picture at the same time in Petropavlovsk (GMT+6) and sent it to me. The question is what will I see in the column "date of shooting" in both of these photographs. Will this value change if I change the timezone on my computer?

Answer 1

Although EXIF ​​is a standard, its implementations still have differences and, often, errors.
EXIF has a 0x882a TimeZoneOffset field that can store one or two values: the GMT offset of the 0x9003 DateTimeOriginal field and (optionally) the offset of the 0x0132 ModifyDate (aka DateTime) field.
However, there are cameras that do not write anything in TimeZoneOffset and do not have offset settings in the interface at all. Instead, they just write what their clock shows to the DateTimeOriginal. Thus, it is impossible to find out in which time zone this photo was taken and what time was set in the camera.
Accordingly, there can also be software that is not based on one of the well-known libraries for working with metadata, and therefore it can safely ignore the zone field (not know about it).
And yet, the time can be somehow stored in the IPTC or XMP section of the photo (if it has already gone through some kind of processing), after which it may turn out that the program that will open this photo later has IPTC priority over EXIF ​​( For example). And ignore anything else. Manufacturer's EXIF ​​tags can further confuse the situation. For example, Olympus has its own 0x0908 DateTimeUTC which must contain the time in UTC (that is, the zero time zone), but who sets the time in cameras to UTC?
Therefore, the answer to your question depends on the specific software in question and on the specific camera. Here is such a mess.