I’m not sure if this is a bug of a data confusion problem, but a new user says inat is misidentifying the timestamp on their photos. I made this on their behalf since they said the same thing in another observation so I figured it was worth having someone take a look.
For some reason inaturalist is not reading the exif data time correctly. The observed date is correct but not the time of day.
Observation timestamp is April 4, 2025 04:06 AM PDT
I see these two seemingly conflicting timestamps on the image data:
Date time 2025-04-04 22:18:45 -0700
Date time original 2025-04-04 04:06:45 -0700
Date time digitized 2025-04-04 04:06:45 -0700
They haven’t actually said what time of day it was observed on, or whether they have edited the observed on time, correct? I don’t think we know enough here, but 4:06 pm looks like a much more realistic time for that photo than 10:18 pm.
They have not said what time is correct, and they have not edited the time. Just a correction the observation says 4:06 AM, not PM, which does seem incorrect for the photo. (Though so does 10pm)
I run in to issues when I travel overseeas. I normally don’t bother adjusting the time in the camera, and do that in post. But when I forget to fix the times before uploading, I get weird times like bright daylight shots taken at “4am”
The user seems to be from the same place where the observation is, so this seems unlikely to be a timezone error, unless they simply misconfigured the time in their camera.