title: How to store a datetime in MySQL with timezone info
body: <p>I have thousands of photos that were taken in Tanzania and I want to store the date and time each photo was taken in a MySQL database. The server, however, is located in the U.S. and I run into problems when I try to store a Tanzanian date-time that falls within the "invalid" hour during spring Daylight Savings time (in the U.S.). Tanzania doesn't do DST, so the time is an actually valid time. </p>
  
  <p>Additional complications are that there are collaborators from many different timezones who will need to access the date-time values stored in the database. I want them to <em>always</em> come out as Tanzanian time and not in the local times that various collaborator are in. </p>
  
  <p>I'm reluctant to set session times because I know that there will be problems when someone sometime forgets to set a session time and gets the times out all wrong. And I do not have authority to change anything about the server.</p>
  
  <p>I've read: 
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532729/daylight-saving-time-and-time-zone-best-practices?rq=1">Daylight saving time and time zone best practices</a> and
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1646171/mysql-datetime-fields-and-daylight-savings-time-how-do-i-reference-the-extra">MySQL datetime fields and daylight savings time -- how do I reference the &quot;extra&quot; hour?</a> and
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1349280/storing-datetime-as-utc-in-php-mysql">Storing datetime as UTC in PHP/MySQL</a></p>
  
  <p>But none of them seems to address my particular problem. I'm not an SQL expert; is there a way to specify timezone when setting DATETIMEs? I haven't seen one. Otherwise, any suggestions on how to approach this issue is greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Edit:
  Here's an example of the problem I'm running into. I send the command:</p>
  
  <pre><code>INSERT INTO Images (CaptureEvent, SequenceNum, PathFilename, TimestampJPG) 
  VALUES (122,1,"S2/B04/B04_R1/IMAG0148.JPG","2011-03-13 02:49:10")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I get the error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error 1292: Incorrect datetime value: '2011-03-13 02:49:10' for column 'TimestampJPG'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This date and time exists in Tanzania, but not in the U.S., where the database is.</p>