monline

"Imagine you have made a world tour in August 2009 (summer time!) and you have used your digital photo camera to create pictures, videos and voice recordings.

In this guide I will not refer to these items by their specific characteristics (photo, video, audio), but simply regard all of them as "files." Secondly, we assume that the files are saved on a storage medium, which is very likely formatted as FAT (as specified in the DCIM standard for digital cameras).

You have created three files in America/Los Angeles (UTC-0700), three files in your hometown Europe/Vienna (UTC+0200) and three files in Asia/Bangkok (UTC+0700), and at the end of the summer, you return to your hometown Europe/Vienna.

This guide shows you how to correctly bring your files' timestamps from a local time zone-based file system (such as your external flash drive, formatted as FAT32) to a file system using coordinated universal time (UTC) (such as your internal hard disk, formatted as HFS+) using the Finder on MacOS X."

Actually this guide is relevant not only for Mac OS X users, but everybody involved with files that have dates from a number of timezones. The same steps should be followed by Windows (etc.) users as well.