[cesaref]

Agreed, there needs to be trust, and how this used to work was that the photographer would gain a reputation for their accurate portrayal and would be picked up by an agency (e.g. magnum). They would supply the picture editors for the newspapers, so the public would have a chain of trust back from the the paper to the photographer.

The equivalent for digital photography is that cameras can sign images - I believe there are some canon/nikon cameras which supported this to allow digital photos to be used in court, but I don't think this idea was widely adopted, so a typical snap on your phone doesn't provide any sort of trust, which is surprising really, but there we are, this is the world we live in.

[exe34]

in a court case, you might still be able to prove a given picture was taken by a given camera, since the ccd has detects. I'm not sure how true that is nowadays with AI making up half the details (like Xerox copiers taking creative licence with the numbers in a table).