I started using google photos awhile ago to archive my vacation photos. Sometimes I want to change the order of the photos and would simply rename them BUT I also found google photos actually displays photos by the date taken, not the name. This is NOT the file creation of modified date but rather something embedded in the metadata.
I store my photos in windows and found I can change the photo date and everything sorts just fine except... Sometimes I want to include some photos from my phone and they have no date in that metadata field. If I just manually plug in the date that's fine except the timezone is now wrong and I need to take that into account when I change the date. I can change the timezone in google photos directly, but then it's out of sync with the original. Phew...
So my question is, how does google photos arrive at the timezone? I've been using the exif python module to examine the metadata and according to the description there are a number of gps metadata fields but none of those are in my photos taken with a Nikon 5600 which has lots of other metadata. I did see some pics have GPS version metadata but nothing that looks like positioning info. Do I need to change some other field name?