Holiday photos may soon need a label saying nothing was corrected

A draft extension of existing disclosure rules would require every published image to carry a manifest of what happened to it between the sensor and the screen. Comparable rules already exist for advertising, where an altered body has to be flagged. The extension would apply the same logic to a photograph of a family on a beach, on the grounds that the beach photograph is seen by more people than the advertisement and was edited by the same software.

The manifest would not be a warning. It would be a list, set in the grey type of a nutrition table: exposure adjusted, background object removed, skin texture reduced (automatic), eyes sharpened (automatic). The word doing all the work is the one in brackets. Nobody chose those entries. They were applied before the shutter finished closing.

Most people would learn something in the first week. A modern phone does not so much photograph a face as reconstruct one, merging several exposures, softening skin, brightening eyes and quietly deciding what a pore is. None of this has been announced, because announcing it was never required and would not have improved sales. A manifest would announce it every time, under every picture, for years.

“The rule concerns disclosure, not aesthetics,” a spokesperson for the standards body would say. “We are not telling anyone their photograph is dishonest. We are telling them what the device did. If that turns out to be a larger statement than we intended, it is because the device did more than people assumed.”

The setting to switch it off would exist, buried where such settings live. People would try it once. The complaint would not be that the unprocessed photograph looks bad — it looks accurate, which is a different thing. The complaint would be that it looks like somebody slightly else: a face with weather on it, closer to the one in the bathroom mirror than the one in the last four hundred posts.

No corrections would then move through the usual stages. First a badge, then a boast, then a genre with its own lighting conventions, then something worth faking. A manifest can be signed, and a signature only proves that a device said so. Within a season somebody would sell a filter whose entire function is to produce an image that declares, in verified grey type, that nothing was done to it.

The rule would have been written to stop an advertiser from selling an impossible body, which is a reasonable thing for a rule to do. Applied to a birthday photograph it would do something else, something its drafters did not intend and could not undo: tell a person, in small letters under a picture of their own face, how far that face has drifted from the one they have been showing everybody.