Just figured outt a bunch of old observation times were off

General
1

I was adding some old photos to ebird checklists and referencing iNat. I realized based off my eBird checklist start time that one of my pictures “time observed” was off by an hour. So I believe I know have lots of observations from two years ago that may be off due to my camera not changing for daylight savings. ugh

2 Likes
2

don’t worry about it too much, unless you have a specific reason you need times on your observations to be accurate down to the minute. lots of observations in iNaturalist have inaccurate times for many different reasons.

3 Likes
3

I’m surprised that there isn’t a batch edit feature for this (at least, none that I could find), given that you can “offset time” for observations on the upload page.

But as Pisum mentioned, it’s not a big deal, probably. I’ve uploaded a bunch of observations where the time was off by a few hours. (Usually when I was collecting in the field and photographing in the lab)

3 Likes
4

This is the reason I remove all the time-of-day info from my observations. I’m notorious for forgetting to change the time on the camera to account for daylight savings or changes in time zones. If I happen to use the phone app, I think I usually leave the time since it updates automatically. However, I also often combine multiple pictures, which technically have multiple times even if they are just minutes apart, making it questionable to pick one observation time - first picture, last picture, middle of the series? If I think time of day is important for putting the observation into a circadian context, I put it into the notes (e.g. late morning, dusk shortly after sunset etc).

5

Relevant feature request and thread:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/allow-option-to-batch-edit-time-by-a-number-of-hours/27898
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-batch-correct-times-on-observations-for-incorrect-clock/10010

1 Like
6

For future reference you can batch correct the image files timestamp and GPS metadata using Geosetter (on Windows), which has a time zone setting when you come to save any changes:
https://geosetter.de/en/

Note that the website is outdated, and the old 3.5.3 version listed there no longer works. But you can get the latest 4.0.49 beta version from here:
https://geosetter.de/geosetter_beta.exe

2 Likes
7

My camera’s clock is set to UTC because file times are stored in UTC and converted when you run “vdir” according to the TZ environment variable. The time in the metadata in the JPEG file is also in UTC, and I adjust it on uploading.

My sound recorder’s clock is set to UTC for the same reason, but the sound files don’t contain their timestamps, so I set the time to what vdir says.