Odd discrepancy in Google Photo date labeling

[straygator]

Last night I took some videos of the July 4th fireworks display over Lake Eola here in Orlando, which I like to share with other family members who can't attend. In the process of reviewing and downloading those videos from my Google Photos website, I noticed a peculiar discrepancy of one calendar day between the informational details, which correctly reflected the date and time when the video was actually shot (e.g., 9:15pm on July 4), and the labeling or coding of the video, which erroneously indicates that it was taken the following day (e.g., PXL_20210705_0xxxxxxxx.mp4). Out of curiosity, I then looked back and was surprised to discover that, at least as far back as September of 2020 when I was still using my prior phone (a Pixel 2XL), photos and videos taken after a certain hour exhibited the same one-day difference.

Based on further analysis and testing, it appears that while the time and date information is properly correlated to my local time (US Eastern), the calendar for labeling or coding rolls over when the day changes at Greenwich Mean Time instead of local time -- i.e., when my local time is GMT-04.00, photos taken after 8:00pm local time are labeled or coded as having been taken the following day; and during that part of the year when my local time is GMT-05.00, the date on the labeling or coding changes at 7:00pm. Are others experiencing this same issue, or is it a glitch that's only happening to me? More importantly, can anyone provide helpful guidance as to what setting, if any, can be adjusted to rectify this discrepancy? Thanks!

 

[Kizzy Catwoman]

How odd. I am on GMT so this wouldn't apply to me, but that is really odd.

 

[Ben xfg]

More importantly, can anyone provide helpful guidance as to what setting, if any, can be adjusted to rectify this discrepancy? Thanks!

I agree this is certainly odd. It would appear though that the problem is with your camera app. Maybe check for settings where timestamps are mentioned.
Did you have location stamping turned on at one point, and then turned it back off when the app thought you were in a different time zone?

 

[straygator]

I agree this is certainly odd. It would appear though that the problem is with your camera app. Maybe check for settings where timestamps are mentioned.
Did you have location stamping turned on at one point, and then turned it back off when the app thought you were in a different time zone?

Thanks, but I've checked all of the settings I could find that might account for the discrepancy. Just to clarify, under the "Details" section of each photo or video, the first category of information always reflects the correct date and time; it is only on the labeling or coding of the photo or video that appears as the second category of information that the next day is incorrectly shown. (To illustrate the problem, a test photo that I took at 8:07 pm today, July 5, is labeled or coded as PXL_20210706_000704742.jpg.) I've always kept the location setting turned on for my camera, because until the pandemic we took annual month-long summer trips to Europe, during which I would take an average of about 100 photos or videos per day, and the location data associated with the photos helps me to identify the location when I catalogue and label them all after returning home.

FWIW, I've isolated the onset of this date discrepancy to the one-month period between August 18, 2020 (when the date information for photos taken after 8 pm was still uniformly correct) and September 22, 2020 (when the one-day difference in dates first appeared on such photos). Due to the pandemic, we haven't traveled outside our time zone since June of 2019, and I can't recall any other potential event that could have caused or incident that would explain the sudden appearance of this peculiar discrepancy. I transitioned to my current Pixel 5 in late November of 2020, but the issue persisted.

I should emphasize that this glitch is merely a minor inconvenience that in no way diminishes my satisfaction with the Pixel phone. As a practical matter, I don't take many photos at night, and in any event I customarily rely on the primary time/date information, which is always correct -- as confirmed by the fact that I didn't even notice this issue for nearly a year. Just the same, I'd like to fix the problem if possible, so I welcome any suggestions as to potential remedies.

 

[B. Diddy]

I see this on my Pixel 3 XL as well. The discrepancy between the time shown for the file creation and the timestamp in the filename is consistently -7 hrs, which is what Pacific Daylight Time is relative to GMT. I'm guessing that the camera app saves the file using GMT as a standardized convention, and the software can adjust the actual time it was taken based on the timezone you're in.

Keep in mind that if you edit a photo in Google Photos, you're changing the time of the last file creation, so the time shown in a file manager won't correspond to the true time you took the photo.