F-Spot time zone confusion

[Paul Fisher]

Binary package hint: f-spot

F-Spot appears to be unable to handle time zone conversion correctly. I had my camera set to local time (UTC−4 at the moment) and imported photos via MTP, and they were all off by four hours. I corrected them in F-Spot, and then set my camera to UTC, but then found that a newly imported photo was now eight hours off—it said it was taken at 8:00 AM when instead it was only shortly after midnight. F-Spot could perhaps store the timestamps internally as UTC, and display them in the local time zone. (I'll inspect the database and EXIF data later to see if this is already the case.)

Hardy Heron, f-spot 0.4.2

[LiraNuna (liranuna)]

I can confirm this bug on both feisty and hardy using "stock" f-spot. Camera is set to time zone of Los_Angeles (PDT) and f-spot adds 7 hours to the images on two unrelated computers.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

seems similar to bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340903

[Ashley Yakeley (ashley-semantic)]

AFAICT F-Spot does two things:

1. Assume that the camera is set to the same time-zone as the local computer

2. Display all times in UTC.

The first one is not so bad, but the second one is the problem.

[Adam (adam-leckron-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Yeah, I agree... displaying the date time in UTC doesn't seem quite right to me either. Maybe they could give an option in the program preferences? Ie, "Preferred Time zone"- and have it default to the computer's time zone settings? That way if someone really wants to be UTC, they could change it.. but for most people, local time zone would be ideal.