When you change your clocks for Daylight Savings time, remember to shift your cameras by one hour too! It’s easy to forget since our computers and phones adjust to DST automatically. Until our still and video cameras do that too, we’ll have to remember to change their time settings manually.

The capture date and time recorded in a photograph is increasingly important. In the era of film it never affected very much except for people who liked to print the date on their snapshots. Today, the capture date/time affects whether images can sort properly by time. With one camera it’s no big deal, but if your business or family has multiple cameras that are not all set to the correct time, your software can’t sort the photos from all those cameras in chronological order. You may not think you have more than one camera, but for example, if you like to shoot with both your SLR and the camera on your phone, you might want to to put photos from both cameras together and have them successfully sort in chronological order.

Capture time errors don’t affect just the photos on your computer, but the copies of those photos that you upload to online services such as Flickr which let you navigate your photos by time. Of course, a one-hour DST error isn’t much, but it can affect you if you’re trying to pinpoint the time a photo was taken compared to the time of an event. In any case, the point is to remember your cameras when you go through any time change: DST, passing through time zones when traveling, and so on.