About the Mother Day’s photo incident almost 2 years ago, why do you think W&K stopped sharing pictures with the rota? I thought it was the internet weirdos that were complaining the photo was photoshopped and it went viral. What the rota has to do with it?
The rota joined the criticism and added to the pile-on.
IMO, if the rota had just been reporting on the criticism, it would've been fine and nothing would've changed. But that's not what the rota did. The rota added their opinions to the criticism, which changed the story. When you have Chris Ship tweeting that the photos are faked because there's a dead leaf and green grass in the background, when there are reporters reproducing the photo in articles that point out all the flaws with first-person commentary...that's not reporting. That's editorializing and that's the kind of media coverage that William doesn't like subjecting his children to.
So before March 2024, the typical procedure for KP photos was that KP would send the photo to the newspapers to be published and to a media company (ex: Getty, Reuters, AP etc.) for distribution, then follow up with a post on their social media. This meant that if anyone wanted to use/reuse the photo, they just had to contact Getty for it.
After the photo edits went viral, internet weirdos started calling on Getty, Reuters, AP, etc. to do something because those companies actually have policies against submitting edited content. The edits Kate or KP made to the photo were pretty innocuous, nothing all that different than what everyone else does and others have submitted previously. But because there was such a public outcry about the KP edits, Getty and AP (there may have been other companies, but I remember these two specifically) issued a kill notice, which basically advised their clients and users that the photo was heavily doctored and violated their photography standards.
(There's also a layer of Wales vs Sussex here - a Sussex surrogate, Misan Harriman, chimed in on the Waleses photo edits and was seen to be helping urge the kill notices. In a tit for tat move, some Waleses fans began filing complaints on several Sussex photographs that had similar photo editing mistakes and in particular, on a couple of Harriman's photos of the Sussexes in which there are on-the-record comments about use of editing. I can't remember specifically, but I think the Waleses' fans were able to get one of the Harriman Sussex photos killed, but again, I don't remember specifically and could be conflating things.)
After March 2024, KP only posted their photos to their social media. They didn't send it to the newspapers or the rota or media companies like Getty and AP. This meant that everyone who wanted to use/reuse photos had to contact KP for it, which meant everyone had to disclose why they wanted to use the photo and KP could either yay (give them the OK to use the photo) or nay (deny their use of the photo) it, creating another layer of control or barrier for access to the Waleses' images.
