Sources close to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry waded into Kate Middleton’s bizarre photo-editing crisis Monday, saying, “This isn’t a mistake Meghan would ever make.”

The exiled British royals would “have been annihilated” if they had handed out secretly Photoshopped images of themselves and their family, sources told Page Six.

The claim comes after Middleton released a photo of herself and her three children for British Mother’s Day, more than two months

since she vanished from public view to deal with a mystery health condition — only for the photo to turn out to have been heavily edited.

The world’s leading photographic news agencies, including Reuters and the Associated Press, warned against their use,

telling customers, including newspapers and television outlets around the world to “kill” the photo.

Its metadata showed it had been edited hastily on Friday and Saturday before its release. There was even speculation she had re-used a 2016 Vogue cover to create a Frankenstein image.

On Monday, the Princess of Wales issued an apology for any “confusion” sparked by the image, saying, “I do occasionally experiment with editing.” Prince William had taken the photo.

But sources close to her brother-in-law, Harry, and his wife told Page Six, “If Harry and Meghan had ever encountered the same issue they would have been annihilated.

“The same rules do not apply to both couples.

“This isn’t a mistake that Meghan would ever make … she has a keen eye and freakish attention to detail.”

There were at least 10 failures in the photo, with only the image of Prince George, 10, apparently unaltered.

Among the mistakes were Princess Charlotte, 8, having had part of her wrist removed, Middleton’s hand missing a wedding ring, and Prince Louis, 5, having strangely crossed fingers.

Royal sources told Page Six that this was “an amateur, family photograph taken by the Prince of Wales.”

They said the couple wanted to offer an “informal” picture of the family together for Mother’s Day, which is marked earlier in the UK than the US, and the princess made “minor adjustments.”

A Kensington Palace source added, “The Wales family spent Mother’s Day together and had a wonderful day.”

Despite calls for the original to be published, Kensington Palace said it would not be reissuing the unedited photograph of Middleton and her children. 

The bizarre photo-bomb threw lighter fuel on the intense speculation, much of it online, around Middleton’s long-running disappearance from public life.

Middleton, 42, has been out of the public eye since having major abdominal surgery in January, with Kensington Palace warning that she would not be back to work until at least Easter.

Speculation about the lack of information about the surgery and its cause intensified last month when William, 41, sparked fears that something was drastically wrong by pulling out of a memorial for his godfather, King Constantine of Greece, just 45 minutes before the event citing “personal reasons.”

This prompted social media to go into hyperdrive about the “missing” princess, forcing the palace to say that she was recovering well.

Days later, photos showed Kate being driven near her home in Windsor by her mother, Carole Middleton.

The photographs were not widely published by UK media to avoid upsetting the royals.

But on Monday, Kate surfaced in public view with her husband for the first time since Christmas, being photographed in the back of a car with William and the images used on British media.

William was going to London for a key royal event, the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey — where he was seen laughing with his stepmother, Queen Camilla — while Kate had a “private appointment,” Page Six was told.

Originally Kate was said to be planning to return to royal duties at Easter but with that date rapidly approaching, no comeback has been scheduled and Britain’s defense ministry had to backtrack when it announced she would be at a high-profile event in June.

The intervention of sources close to Kate’s bitterly estranged brother-in-law and his wife is unlikely to be felt positively at Kensington Palace.

One royal source told Page Six that Markle is “control freak” about imagery, adding, “She always wants the final say, especially when it came to her editing of Vogue.”

Markle “guest-edited” the British edition of Vogue in 2019 but was said to have left staff exasperated, while her theme of 15 women she was inspired by stirred controversy when it did not include Queen Elizabeth.

We’re also told that Markle, 42, never wanted to follow the palace procedure of releasing images via photo agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and only ever wanted to post them on the Instagram @sussexroyal which she controlled, retaining the copyright to them.

In addition to this, the Sussexes had their own photo issue with their 2019 holiday card which featured a picture of baby Prince Archie, which social media claimed was photoshopped.

One of the charities of which they were patrons —the Queens Commonwealth Trust — tweeted out the card, but the Sussex team ended up banning its use via the top UK photo agency, the Press Association.

After they quit royal life, Meghan and Harry also found themselves at odds with William and Kate over their Netflix’s “Harry & Meghan” tell-all docu-series.

When the first three episodes were released in December 2022, both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace claimed that reps had not been approached to comment.

However, officials soon changed their story, saying that they had been contacted by “a third-party production company” but their attempts to verify the company’s authenticity with Netflix and Archewell Productions – the Sussexes’ production company, which co-produced the docu-series – received no response.

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Source: The Washington Post