It’s happened before! All the previous Royal Family editing errors amid the Kate drama

Yesterday, Kate Middleton released a photo of her and her kids to try and stop all the rumours and conspiracy theories that were running wild about her. Unfortunately, this kind of backfired with everyone instead believing the photo was either severely edited or just straight-up AI-generated. There are a load of editing errors in the photo that are pretty hard to explain.

Attempting to quash these rumours, today the Princess of Wales has released a statement saying she did in fact edit the photo. She said: “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.”

Since then we’ve had millions of “experimenting with editing” memes and lots of calls for the Royal Family to release the original photo. Kate has also been spotted in the car with William this afternoon.

But it turns out this isn’t the first time The Royal Family has been embroiled in a photo editing scandal and this has actually happened before. And the same problems with hands have cropped up.

So these are all the other Royal Family editing errors you probably missed:

Prince Louis’ missing finger

This was the Christmas photo released by the Waleses last year and people were quick to point out that Prince Louis is actually missing a finger. One person said: “While it’s a nice family photo, as soon as I looked at it, I noticed Louis’ hand. He is missing a finger.”

Another person added: “Photoshop picture. Check Prince Louis’ fingers. One is short.” A Royal spokesperson did deny the claims at the time, telling The Mail: “It’s not photoshopped. It seems as if he [Louis]… just bent his finger over. He’s certainly not lost a finger – don’t worry about that!”

In the same photo, other people pointed out that the family’s legs are a bit tangled and aren’t all in the right place. William’s left leg has disappeared as have Kate’s feet behind the chair. There also seems to be an extra leg belonging to no one on the left of the picture.

Harry and Meghan’s picture kill

One of the big moments over the last day was when the picture got a picture kill by Reuters AP, and Getty Images because of suspected doctoring. But this has actually happened before – to Harry and Meghan.

In 2019, they released an annual Christmas card of the two of them and their son Archie. The kill said that “PA has since been advised that the picture is not representative of the Christmas card sent by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” It seemed as if the original photo was edited to make Meghan and Archie’s faces clear whilst Harry’s was blurry.

Great-grandchildren Photoshop

In April last year, this photo of the Queen, taken just weeks before her death at Balmoral, went viral after someone noticed it had been edited. In the photo, the Queen is posing with her 12 great-grandchildren but you can notice where the two sides of the sofa have been edited together.

One person said: “You can literally see where the two sides of the sofa were sliced together, and there are pixels on the face that were not properly edited. As I stated in my original tweet, I don’t see anything wrong with it. But to claim it’s not Photoshopped is false. It’s been edited.”

Related stories recommended by this writer

• Kate Middleton has just confirmed yesterday’s Royal Family photo was actually edited

•  Edited photos and international scandal: A full timeline of the weird Kate Middleton picture

• Kate has admitted she edited it, so here are all the dodgy editing errors in *that* photo

Featured image (before edits) via X.