The Keystone Cops of Kensington Palace and *that* photo

Answering five questions about what went wrong with that Mother's Day image of Kate and her kids

EMERGENCY PHOTO FUROR NEWSLETTER!

Good grief, what was Kensington Palace thinking?

That was my initial thought as kill notices from the world’s major news photo agencies filled my Twitter feed last night.

A kill notice is the news version of a death sentences for a photograph. It is removed from the agency’s library and clients are warned not to use it. That four major agencies — Associated Press, Getty, Agence France-Presse, Reuters — sent out alerts over what looks like a simple family snap of Kate, Princess of Wales, with her three children meant this was going to be THE STORY of the day, overshadowing events marking Commonwealth Day.

Two of the kill notices regarding the photo of Kate and her children

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE IMAGE?

Kensington Palace released the image on Sunday, which is Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom, with a note: “A new picture of The Princess of Wales, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis was posted on our social media channels today to mark Mother’s Day. The image was taken in Windsor earlier this week by the Prince of Wales. The image will be distributed by the UK Press Association and will be available through the UK Royal Rota system.”

The Wales’s social media accounts included a personal message from the princess, who signs such messages with a “C” for Catherine”: “Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months. Wishing everyone a Happy Mother's Day. C”

The image of Kate and her children showed a smiling mother and her happy children — everything needed to quieten the conspiracy theories swirling about her health. It was the first time we’d had a clear image of Kate since Christmas Day. She’d been recovering from abdominal surgery in mid-January and isn’t expected to resume her official duties until after Easter (March 31).

All appeared normal until photo sleuths noticed that parts of the photo appeared to have been altered. The problems weren’t hard to find. Just zoom in on a decent copy of the image and you’ll notice a blurring on the hands and fingers of Princess Charlotte and Kate, and that something has been altered regarding Prince Louis’s arm and leg as the background details don’t quite match up.

Chris Ship of ITV News showed a few of the problems in a tweet (see below), while Adam Parker, the OSINT editor at Sky News, looked at the photo’s metadata and discovered that “The image has been saved in photo editing software Adobe Photoshop two times on an Apple Mac. The first at 9.54pm on Friday night. The second save was at 9.39am on Saturday morning.”

After the kill notices were issued, I reached out to a veteran news photo editor to ask her thoughts on the photo (she asked not to be named). Like so many, she was looking at the image and noticing the obvious changes. “Someone messed with it,” she says. “It’s not a perfect manipulation,” she adds, saying, “They have chosen a photo where it’s easy to change and add things.”

In particular, she focused in on a very faint horizontal line that appears across Kate’s body (see the middle of the below screengrab ). You’ll notice that the zipper above the line is clear, while below that line, the zipper moves a bit to the right and becomes less clear. In addition, her hair near the zipper suddenly ends at that horizontal line. “They’ve stitched a series of frames together” into one composite image, the photo editor believes.

On Monday, Kate offered an explanation, again on social media, roughly 12 hours after the kill notices were sent out: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C”

WHY IS TWEAKING A FAMILY PHOTO A PROBLEM?

There are family photos, and then there are ROYAL FAMILY PHOTOS. It’s easy to tweak a photo if Uncle Bob is grimacing, Baby Marriam can’t keep her eyes open or there’s a shadow over the face of Cousin Nicole. The software is widely available, is easy to use, is used more and more, and has dramatically improved the quality of such family snaps.

Then there are “photo studio” images (think fashion photos), which are famously retouched, including changing the colour of a dress from red to white, or slimming a centimetre or two off of a waist.

“Many people regard it as perfectly normal to mess around with the photos they post on social media. Phones are marketed for their ability to do this. News organisations however are very reluctant to publish such images, and doing so can contravene watchdog IPSO's Editors Code,” explained Jonathan Walker, the deputy political editor of Britain’s Sunday Express, on Twitter. (That code from the Independent Press Standards Organisation is here.)

The world of news photography is so completely different from those of personal or photo studio images that it comes with very, very strict rules, especially now that photos are digital files. The agencies, their clients, and people looking at those images have to be able to trust that those photos are true representations of what happened. The Associated Press even forbids photographers from correcting red eyes in their images. (One major news photo contest is so strict that removing a speck of dust from an image can be considered tampering, the news editor tells me.)

“They are only as good as their reputations and don’t want to publish anything manipulated,” the photo editor explains to me. And in this era, that means anything that has been smoothed, enhanced, or tweaked. And certainly nothing changed through artificial intelligence. They use software as a standard tool to detect such manipulations. “It’s like bread and butter,” she says.

This royal photograph was released through those photo agencies, which means that their rules have to be followed. And it’s clear that they believe the image of Kate and her kids broke those rules, which is why they issued kill notices.