Time zones, are they important? How do you change it?

Hi all,
I am posting this question because I couldn’t find any previous questions in the forum. It seems the default time zone for me is EST when uploading from my computer. (However when I upload from the app the time zone appears to be correct.) I would have thought it would change the time zone automatically based on either camera information, or the geographical location. A number of my observations come from southern Africa, even my observations from last summer to Arizona, New Mexico, Utah are in EST. As a zoologist with experience in museum collections, I want to make sure that my sightings have correct data and can be of the most use for future researchers.

My question then is:

  1. Is the correct time zone vitally important when analyzing the data?
  2. If so, how do you change the time zone?
  3. Is there a way to batch change a number of observations to the correct time zone?

Thanks

Go to Account settings from the profile picture menu in the desktop version of iNaturalist to set a time zone. I found that my observations being posted using the Android app were showing as being 17 hours old as soon as I uploaded them. Although my Moto G7 phone was set to Central Daylight Time here in Wisconsin, the desktop account settings were still set to GMT+11 which is where I live and work. I am at GMT-6 for only this summer. The mobile app in Android uses the time set in the desktop version, not the time zone set on the phone.

There may be way to set a time zone in the desktop app per each observation, but not in the mobile app as far as I am aware.

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so funny, I was trying to get rid of the dropdown menu until I realised it was your screen shot :D
but thanks for the helpful reply because I just noticed my observations were coming up HST (Hawaii) and I’m in Australia (151 observations too late)

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