It comes down to this, in the end:
- Camera writes file. FAT32 timestamp is recorded in local time only, with zero knowledge of time zones.
- As it scans the memory card or camera, Rapid Photo Downloader needs to take extra steps to interpret the time stamps so they actually make sense to a human, because time zones do matter to us in a pragmatic sense. All the details are in the code, e.g. here. These details are confusing so I won’t go into detail here, but they are important.
- Time zone changes because of travel or daylight savings is starts / ends. All times on the file card are off by change in offset. There is no record of this on FAT32 file system.
The key points are 1 & 3.