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A software developer’s musings on software development

Timesync app

I run into a problem when organizing photos after a trip- my DSLR camera is often off a bit from the correct time. Sometimes this is because I haven’t changed it since a DST switchover, other times it’s just off a minute or so because it doesn’t keep great time. This becomes a problem when I’ve also got photos from my phone and my wife’s phone and sometimes from my kids’ phones. I’m really picky about wanting these things to have synchronized timestamps. For the phones, this is not a big deal because they synchronize themselves often to the correct time. But for the DSLR, it’s not that smart (maybe newer cameras are, but mine isn’t that new).

What I’ve wanted to do is take a photo of the time on my phone and use that to sync it later, but for some annoying reason the iPhone’s built-in clock app only shows the time to the minute, not the second. I tried searching for an app to do this, but the app store is littered with ad-infested bloatware. (I get it; last I checked you have to pay Apple $100/year to publish an app, so no one wants to put simple apps out there for free no matter now simple.)

But I realized I could easily write a simple webpage that does this with Javascript, so I did: timesync

If this solves a problem you have, feel free to bookmark that on your phone! Right now it only shows Eastern time, but I’ll probably add time zone selection at some point.

Enjoy!