Research overview: EXIF metadata, timestamps, and data hygiene

Every camera-trap image carries embedded metadata, timestamps, camera settings, and sometimes temperature or moon phase, and the integrity of this information is foundational to nearly all analysis. This overview surveys the importance of accurate timestamps for activity and capture-recapture analysis, the pitfalls of misconfigured clocks, time-zone errors, and daylight-saving shifts, and best practices for managing EXIF data through ingestion, organization, and archiving. It discusses tools for extracting and standardizing metadata, the risks of losing or corrupting it during file transfers, and the value of consistent naming and folder conventions tied to deployments. Poor data hygiene silently undermines results, misaligned timestamps distort activity overlap, lost station identifiers break capture histories. The overview emphasizes disciplined metadata management as an unspectacular but decisive determinant of whether camera-trap data yield trustworthy science.