Impact of Synchronizing DSLR DateTime

[NEatonJr]

I've been testing my script for the eclipse on the 8th and as I went through the images from today's full run, I noticed something unexpected in the metadata: the timestamps are aligned to the script event times as the exist in the SEM UI, i.e., in UTC rather than local time.

I get and understand why the app uses UTC to drive everything. However, based on my understanding of EXIF, values in DateTimeOriginal are generally in local time. It seems there is a set of EXIF elements related date time offsets that can be used when DateTimeOriginal is in UTC but I don't see such elements in the image metadata.

I had expected that enabling the setting Always synchronize the DSLR datetime would be setting the camera time to local time but based on the image metadata it must be setting it to UTC. If that's the case, I'm fine with that and in fact for images I'll submit to the Eclipse MegaMovie I suspect that might be better for their purposes. But for my own purposes and for how I catalog and track images, my preference is local time.

I am primarily writing to confirm whether my interpretation of what I am seeing and, by extension, the apparent behavior of SEM, is correct.

Clear skies,
Nathan

PS. Xavier, thanks for a great piece of software!