On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 01:52:45PM -0400, Pat Suwalski wrote: > Tim Retout wrote: > Disagreed. There is no such thing as a "floating date".
If a time is stored in the database w/o a timezone then you don't know what timezone it is. It's "floating". Perl's DateTime objects use this term as well for objects that do not have a timezone associated. But, f-spot stores an epoch (as an integer) for timestamps. That, of course, is a point in time. The trick on importing it making sure that the epoch you determine from the photo is correct. So, if the EXIF date/time does not include a timezone you need to specify the timezone on import. That can be used to correctly determine the epoch for saving with the photo. All that's needed is the timezone that the camera is using. For the vast majority of people that will be their local time. Even when traveling I suspect most do not change their camera's time zone. But, it should be something that can be specified at import time. Now, displaying dates of the images is a different issue. For that you want to store a timezone along with the image. It will be up to the user to decide what timezone to use. Do you want to see all times local to the computer (which might show some photos in daylight when the time taken shows night), or set the timezone on the photo to reflect the location it was taken? In that case, the photos would display in order but the times (ignoring the timezone) might look out of order (if photos were taken at the same moment but in vastly different timezones). If you happen to change the time on the camera when traveling then the import is not going to be pretty and will need a way to adjust the epoch stored in the database. > > This is not rocket science, a user will do this if they want to. Adding > timezones complicates this. That's no excuse for ignoring timezones. Defaulting to the local timezone for both import and display is probably smart, and makes it simple for the user. The act of converting from EXIF date to an epoch for the database requires knowledge of a timezone. So, the question is does f-spot provide a way to select the timezone or just not provide this feature and possibly incorrectly assume the local time zone? And since many people to travel out of their timezone, it may not be unreasonable to expect them to want to see the photos with the time the event happened at the location the photo was taken, not the time it was back at their computer running f-spot. -- Bill Moseley [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ F-spot-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list
