# ADR-0001: Dates are true instants; wall clocks are a display concern

**Status**: accepted (2026-09-24)

## Context

`image_exif.date_taken` (Unix i64) accumulated four conventions in one column, indistinguishable
without joining on `date_taken_source`: EXIF rows were camera wall-clocks reinterpreted as UTC,
exiftool rows were naive dates interpreted in the server's local zone, filename rows were
deliberate wall-as-UTC, and filesystem-time rows were true instants. SMS-API and the Apollo
location track were already true UTC. Every consumer had to re-derive the missing shift
(Apollo's `_naive_to_real_utc`, the frontend `naiveAsUtcToRealUtc`, FileViewer's bare
device-local formatting, `/memories`'s per-client offset) and they disagreed: the same photo
showed different clocks in the two apps, exiftool-sourced videos (whose dates only come from
exiftool) were double-shifted, and the insight-context prompt formatted a value 4–5 hours
wrong for video rows, rolling across midnight near day edges.

## Decision

The date a media file was captured is stored as a **true instant** (Unix seconds of the
actual moment). The wall clock the camera showed is a **display value**, recovered from the
instant plus a per-row **camera offset** resolved at ingest by a cascade (explicit EXIF
offset tag → GPS position → server zone, the last recorded as an assumption). Day-level
grouping uses the owner's **display zone** (an IANA zone name). Manual edits enter as wall
clocks in the display zone (rendered naive-as-UTC by the client) and are
stored as instants; the legacy column keeps the sent value verbatim and
revert restores a snapshot of both the legacy pair and the new-contract
triple (`original_date_taken*` / `original_date_utc` /
`original_camera_offset_minutes` / `original_date_taken_tz_source`).

Consequences of the decision:

- Matching photo↔SMS, photo↔location, and photo↔calendar becomes instant-to-instant with no
  per-consumer shift; the re-anchoring helpers in the consumers are deleted, not migrated.
- A photo's displayed time can differ from the owner's local time (a photo taken in Japan
  shows the Japan wall clock); grouping still uses the owner's day. This is deliberate.
- The legacy `date_taken` column is frozen during migration (a new `date_utc` column is
  populated by a per-tick backfill drain), so rollback is a client-side flip and the old
  contract stays byte-identical until cutover. The legacy column is retained after cutover
  for historical context.

## Considered options

- **Standardize on wall-clock-as-UTC** (fix only the exiftool branch): cheapest, but every
  consumer would still carry a display-zone re-anchor as a proxy for the camera's zone, and
  cross-zone photo↔SMS matching would stay approximate. Rejected.
- **Two parallel fields as a permanent contract** (wall-as-UTC `date_taken` + `date_utc`):
  honest, but leaves the ambiguity in the interface forever. The dual-field shape is used
  *temporarily* (migration window) only.
- **Server-side conversion per request** (keep the column as-is, convert on read): pushes
  the mixed-convention join onto every query and every consumer; rejected.

## Non-obvious rules worth remembering

- **Filename date class outranks EXIF** — for files whose filename carries the capture date
  (screenshots, timestamp exports), the filename is the original date of record, inverting
  the global EXIF-wins rule. The class is a documented exception, not a bug.
- **Offset resolution is per-row and audited** (`date_taken_tz_source`), because a library
  contains photos from many zones; a single global offset would be wrong for every trip.
- **The display zone is a zone name, not minutes** — a hardcoded offset silently breaks at
  DST. (The legacy `tz_offset_minutes` default of -480 on a New York server is a surviving
  symptom of this.)
- **Re-dating across a day boundary invalidates derived day data** (daily summaries, reel
  pre-gen), which regenerates on its normal schedule; the backfill drain detects the day
  change per row.
- **Container dates are true instants, not wall clocks.** QuickTime/MP4/MOV
  `creation_time` fields are seconds-since-1904 in UTC; exiftool renders them as
  UTC-naive strings. Running a naive container string through the camera wall-clock
  cascade reinterprets a UTC instant in the server zone and shifts every video by the
  server's UTC offset (the "videos off by 4–5 hours" bug, ticket #115). Verified against
  production data: a mirrorless video lands inside the same-moment photo burst, and the
  delta across all sampled videos is the uniform server EDT/EST offset. So the exiftool
  branch classifies the *group* of each tag: zoned strings are instants outright,
  container-group naives are instants (`utc_direct`), and only photo-EXIF-group naives
  run the cascade. The legacy column for those rows stays byte-identical to the old
  `-d %s` server-local interpretation; the new-contract columns carry the true instant.
- **The legacy column is reproduced in Rust, not by re-invoking exiftool.** The old
  `-d %s` path interpreted exiftool's rendered naive string in the *server's* local zone
  (DST-aware, ignoring the file's own `OffsetTime*` tags — verified). `date_taken`
  for exiftool rows must keep producing exactly that value, so the resolver parses the
  raw string and applies the server-zone interpretation itself (`utc_direct` rows skip
  the cascade but still get the server-local legacy value).