In which I do give a damn about inaccurate metadata

I'm going to do a tech rant now, so you can turn off if you're sick of them. Apple fans, however, may be pleased to know that for once the rant isn't about something they own. It is in fact about the HTC Desire Z.

Firstly, it's not a bad phone overall. It's certainly not the most technically advanced phone in the world, but it has a keyboard which is a must for my fat fingers. It does everything an Android 2.3 device should do. One of the things it does is take photos. Sadly the camera app on it is pathetic.

Again, I must clarify: I appreciate that all phone cameras are shit. The lenses are tiny and despite manufacturer claims of massive numbers of megapixels and "high definition" cameras, there isn't a phone camera in the world that is good enough for anything more than taking photos for sharing on Twitter. This I can forgive. What I have a problem with is the actual camera software, specifically the metadata it stores with each photo.

Every digital camera since the dawn of time has a realtime clock. When you take a photo, the time and date is stored with it. This allows photo management software like Picasa and iPhoto to organise photos in chronological order. Over time, geo-tagging has become common, mainly because of smartphones. The idea here is that the geo-coordinates of the image are also stored in the digital file, so you can now sort by location as well. The Desire Z does both of these things badly.

The timestamp stored is always the local time, with no timezone information. This means that if you take a photo in Paris, then fly to London and take a photo there within an hour, the London photo will appear to have been taken first, and there is nothing you can do about it other than manually edit the time in the image. This is also a problem during summer time when DST is in place, if you have lots of photos taken at the same time each day, you need to adjust the time for summer. The correct thing to do would have been to store the timezone information along with the date, or even better, simply store the UTC timestamp which is the same worldwide, like my standalone camera does.

It also buggers up the geo-information. When you open the camera app it begins searching for GPS satellites. If you take a photo before it gets a fix, rather than not adding a location, it will add the last location it found, even if it was hours ago. Frequently I take photos miles away from my home and they're tagged as being at my house because that was the last place I used the GPS. No problem, I hear you say, simply turn geo-tagging off, right? Well, no, because if you turn geotagging off it will still store a location, but it will store latitude and longitude co-ordinates 0,0, which, as any geography expert will tell you, is in the Atlantic just off the west coast of central Africa.

I've no idea if it's just the Desire Z, all HTC phones, or indeed all Android 2.3 phones that have these two problems, but for christ sake someone sort it out. If I were to buy a camera phone and take a photo of my hamster and get a photo of a goat I'd consider the phone to be faulty - EXIF data is no different.