> Can you provide more information about how you intend to use this information?
I'm putting albums and photos on a timeline according to date/time. It's not a long continuous timeline either it's kind of chopped up by units of time. All 2011 photos, all June photos, all June 30th photos. I can send a URL if you ping me. For photos it's not a problem because exif:time is the local time when the photo was taken, there are no timezone issues. For albums we have a UTC timestamp but no timezone offset. That means we can interpret the time as UTC or in some the viewer's time zone. But neither of these is what we want. Consider an album uploaded late June 30th. If you use UTC that will appear as July 1st instead, so it will be uniformly wrong for everyone. If you use viewer time it will appear as June 30th for some and July 1st for others, so sporadically wrong. You really want local time to anchor it to June 30th. There is sort of a subtle issue here why the original local time is right in this context. I believe it's because photos and albums are historical events at a specific place, and we tend to talk about historical events in the local time of the event. We don't say the declaration of independence was signed July 5th your time! > These timestamps are all listed as GMT. I don't believe that we return the > offset, but you can adjust these based on viewer. So really there are 3 ways to do timestamps: 1) Don't convert, store directly as local time (e.g. exif:time) 2) Convert to GMT, don't provide offset (picasa albums) 3) Convert to GMT, provide offset 1) is okay for me because I want local time. 2) is a problem with no obvious workaround. 3) would be the best of both worlds, use either time you want. It's just a few extra bytes, it should be considered for the future. BTW, the main picasaweb site does completely the wrong thing here. It takes the exif:time and applies a timezone correction to it! Thus the time displayed (and often date) is completely wrong: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=4e8c538fed0298b1&hl=en -Philip -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Picasa Web Albums API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-picasa-data-api?hl=en.
