Time handling in F-Spot

[Baasha <baasha shaw ca>]

Hi Paul,
You are lucky that your time only gets shifted 2 hours; mine gets 
shifted by 7 hours.  I have a suspicion that this may have something to 
do with what time zone you are in.  Does F-Spot pick up information from 
the system clock and then make what it thinks is the appropriate 
adjustment?  In my case, I live in GST - 8 but I got my camera in the 
summer time so the difference would have been 7 hours when I first 
installed the program.  From that time onward F-Spot shifts the time by 
7 hours even though the system clock automatically adjusts back to 
standard time.  That leads me to think that the time shifting gets hard 
coded according to when the program was installed.  It certainly is 
weird behaviour.

As for the solution, I think that F-Spot should not change the exif time 
data.  If I happen to take a photo at high noon in a different time zone 
I still want, and expect, F-Spot to tell me this picture was taken at 
noon.  As it is now, it is obvious looking at shadows in a picture that 
the shot was not taken when F-Spot is telling me it was taken.  I can 
not think of any good reason why F-Spot should shift the time.  After 
all, how many people are constantly taking pictures in multiple time 
zones anyway.  There are two easy ways a photographer could correct the 
time if need be.  You can either change the time in the camera to match 
your location, or if you forget, you can tell F-Spot to shift the time 
to what you want.  F-Spot should NOT be making assumptions about what 
the time is.  It is a real PIA to constantly have to change the time 
manually for every photo I load into F-Spot.  I have never seen any 
rational explanation as to why someone thought that this should be the 
normal behaviour.  If there is a good reason for this, it should be made 
an option controlled by the user.

Bob