How are pictures used in court when it is getting increasingly getting easier to alter them
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If you want to use any evidence in court you need to be able to provide proof making it unlikely that it have been manipulated. Usually evidence comes with a full record of the chain of custody and witness statements from the people who collected the evidence in the first place. Most of this is not presented in the trial though. But it is part of the pre-trial discovery process that only involves the lawyers and occasionally the judge. If one of the lawyers wants to dispute any evidence they have to do it in the discovery process. Disputing evidence for the first time in the trial may be a mistrial and possibly contempt of court.
But because any evidence might be disputed in this way you rarely see people go to criminal trial with only one piece of evidence against them. And when this happens they usually gets acquitted. But if you have a picture with a full record of the chain of custody making it unlikely to have been altered and you have other pieces of evidence showing the same as the picture then you may use the picture as part of a trial.
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