Two possibilities; either all of our attempts to update the photo have utterly failed due to network issues, or, just as likely, someone lied about what time the photo was taken at.

The former can happen due to poor connectivity; we do quite a few flickr queries sometimes, especially in places that don’t have lots of photographs, and if it dies partway through, you might not get an update.

The latter is much more frequent, though - HDRs seem to be a big culprit.  If you look at the text in the upper-leftmost-corner of your screen, you’ll see some text, and one of those things tells you who took the photo, and what time the photo says it was taken at.  If the camera was set in some funky timezone and misreports its time data, that’s going to turn up at the wrong time.  Also, if the software used to create the HDR uses the time the HDR was created as the date taken, instead of the time of the source images used to create the HDR, it can go horribly wrong.

Ideally, the latter problem gets fixed as people become aware of how useful it can be to have proper date information on photographs.  I try to address it through careful search term definition, but some slip through.  Drop me a support mail with the current weather conditions and the URL at the top, and I’ll see if I can get rid of those false positives.

Sometimes, it’s just going to be wrong.  Hopefully, even when it’s wrong, it’s pretty.

Last updated on January 10, 2010 by Gregory Block