you read this right: setting your camera to UTC is my recommendation.

Klaus

I was getting confused due to your statement “It is important that your camera’s clock is set to UTC”. I read this as always set the clock UTC no matter where in the world I took the photo.

thanks for your contribution.

The whole time stamp concept has a potential for confusion, even more so if you consider DST. However, the core idea is simple: every picture should include the local time of the location where it was shot, with a reference to UTC. This way, you know the local time: “this picture was taken at 3 p.m., that’s when they start the first water show at the Fountains of Bellagio”. The reference to UTC ensures that you can put your image into a global context, e.g. if you put it on Flickr and want find out what pictures were taken at the same moment around the world. Or if you want to compare images taken before and after DST. Or if you just want to make sure that whatever freaking time zone you were in, you have a standardised reference time (you’ll understand this when you’re doing a trip across the US one day).

So, to answer your question: set the +/- levels to indicate the local time zone of the shot, not to your Australian home zone. And don’t forget to consider DST: in winter, a 12:30 shot taken in London would read “12:30:00+00:00″ (12:30 local time, local time is equal to UTC), while in summer the same shot would be “12:30:00+01:00″ (12:30 local time, local time is one hour ahead of UTC because of daylight saving time).

Hope this helped clear things up.

Klaus

Just found this interesting post. I’m familiar with writing ExifTool scripts.

Still a little unclear on what value I should be updating the script with. You state “Change both values “+=1″ to the timezone of your images”. So as an example, I shoot an image in England with camera set at UTC. I live in Australia, east cost which is UTC/GMT+10, except in Summer it’s UTC+11. Do I set the script value to +=10 if I shot the image in Australian Winter and +=11 if in Australian Summer (even though, in England it would be Winter) ?