Correcting the capture time of your photos

I prefer my photos’ metadata to include the correct capture time, regardless of which timezone it was taken in. But I would never spend time to figure out how to adjust the built-in clock on my camera. And even if that was easy, I would always forget to do it anyway.

So when I travel, I just take photos of clocks and then use those to adjust the capture time of the whole set. Usually there are plenty of clocks on transport systems, and, as you know, photos I take mainly have to do with transport. This one is from the London Tube:

In Lightroom, I select the whole set of photos from some trip, then choose a photo of a clock (this does not void the selection), and then I set the photo’s capture time to whatever the clock displays. This makes Lightroom adjust the capture time of all selected photos accordingly.

This method is great because it does not require any discipline: you can adjust time whenever you want. A couple of days ago I needed a photo from 2005, and it had the wrong capture time. I just found a photo of a clock in that set and corrected the whole set in a matter of seconds.

Sometimes І would notice an accidental clock or watch in some photo and just glance at the capture time. Yep, it is all right with this one from Trafalgar Square:

Obviously, the ideal camera should know the time without any action on my part, as the iPhone does. Or, better, the camera should be just an iPhone dock. But this is unfortunately not the case with my Canon.