How can you believe what you see?

One of the many unintended consequences of that image released by Kensington Palace has been to open up of a discussion about how we can believe the images we are told are real. The botched Photoshop fix applied to - and apparently by - the Princess of Wales' photo with her children has thrown the Palace into the mistrust bad books of the world's picture agencies.

For a royal family whose lives are constantly surrounded by baseless accusations and unfounded speculation, this was a monumentally big ball to drop.

For a news media used to checking and verifying misinformation from war zones and oppressed regimes this was a misinformation curveball they weren't expecting. Every outlet rushed out releases reporting 'the first picture of Kate since surgery.' All later changed tack as first Charlotte's cardigan, then Kate's zip, then Louis' jumper saw the picture pulled apart pixel by pixel.

What none of us had, what none of us have, is an easy way to prove provenance.

Sure, there's metadata. But reading that is a professional sport.

This story was big enough for data analysts at Sky News to go digging through the data. They were able to gather more about the picture because Kensington Palace had shared a high-res version of the picture directly with newsrooms. Had this picture been uploaded only to social media sites, that level of detail would have been stripped from the image. This time, they could tell the image was taken at the family's home in Windsor using a Canon 5D Mark IV and a 50mm lens. It had been run through Photoshop twice - once late on Friday and again the following morning - using the 23.5 version of the Adobe software.

It altered a lot more than blurs and wrinkles. For news providers like the picture agencies who 'killed' Kate's picture it has altered their entire approach to the Palace. AFP's Global News Director has gone as far as suggesting it is no longer a trusted source. It could go further too. This isn't the first noble institution to test our trust, nor the first image manipulated without explanation.

We live in a world where we are all beginning to realise we can't believe everything we see. We are beginning to brace for fakery. This time its from the Palace, but it is a short hop to extrapolate that skepticism onto any and all other institutions previously considered trustworthy.

That presents a new problem. When we can't believe our eyes, what and who can we trust?

For those of us who work for news organisations, it presents another problem too. How can we prove our pictures are real? We may not be dabbling in late night picture manipulation but how do we prove that to our viewers?

Provenance projects like C2PA may be widely adopted one day but the problem is right here, right now. Outside the castle walls the people are beginning to unbelieve.