I noticed that many of my photos had incorrect timezone metadata. The root cause was daylight saving time, but this issue can also come from a misconfigured camera timezone in general. In this post, I’ll walk through how I identified the problem and fixed it.1
My situation
After looking into it, I realized that my Sony Alpha 6000 does not automatically handle daylight saving time. Instead, it has to be manually adjusted:
- Summer time (DST): +1 hour
- Winter time: normal time
Since I didn’t change this setting, all my summer photos were off by one hour.
Inspecting metadata with ExifTool
To fix this, I used ExifTool. Download and extract it from: https://exiftool.org/
Basic usage
Show all metadata:
path/to/exiftool.exe file.jpg
Show only time-related fields:
path/to/exiftool.exe -time:all file.jpg
What I found
Looking at one of my images, I saw:
Modify Date : 2026:04:18 09:56:46
Date/Time Original : 2026:04:18 09:56:46
Create Date : 2026:04:18 09:56:46
Sony Date Time : 2026:04:18 09:56:46
Sony Date Time 2 : 2026:04:18 08:56:46
Observations:
- The main EXIF fields (
Date/Time Original,Create Date,Modify Date) all match but are is 1 hour behind the wall clock Sony Date Timematches them as wellSony Date Time 2is 2 hours behind wall clock
I assume that Sony Date Time 2 represents the timestamp in UTC, while the other fields are stored in the camera’s configured timezone.
Fixing the timestamps
Since my camera was effectively 1 hour behind, I needed to add +1 hour to all relevant fields.
exiftool.exe "-AllDates+=1:0:0" "-SonyDateTime+=1:0:0" *.jpg
AllDates updates the fields Modify and Create Date, and Date/Time Original. Sony Date Time seems to be a custom field and needs an extra entry.
Result
I store my images in Immich, and both Windows Explorer and Immich picked up the correct time. Immich even detected the correct timezone, likely by interpreting the difference between Create Date and Sony Date Time 2.
- This post was written with the help of ChatGPT 5.3 for drafting and editing. ↩︎
