If your camera or your phone is configured with the wrong time zone, your photos will be tagged with an incorrect timestamp.

My camera was off by 11 hours, resulting in the following incorrect metadata:

exiftool 2025-08-17\ 00.48.46.JPG | grep 48
File Name                       : 2025-08-17 00.48.46.JPG
File Modification Date/Time     : 2025:08:17 00:48:46-04:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2025:08:17 00:48:46-04:00
Modify Date                     : 2025:08:17 00:48:46
Date/Time Original              : 2025:08:17 00:48:46
Create Date                     : 2025:08:17 00:48:46

To fix this, I can shift all timestamps backwards by 11 hours with exiftool for all of my *.JPG files:

exiftool -overwrite_original -AllDates-=11:0:0  "-FileModifyDate-=11:0:0"  "-FileCreateDate-=11:0:0" *.JPG
  • The -AllDates option will change the DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, and ModifyDate fields
  • The -FileModifyDate and -FileCreateDate options allow us to adjust the filesystem timestamps

To further illustrate the proper syntax, let's see how to shift time forward on all photos by 5 hours and 30 minutes:

exiftool -overwrite_original -AllDates+=5:30:0 "-FileModifyDate+=5:30:0" "-FileCreateDate+=5:30:0" *.JPG