New theory emerges over where Kate Middleton Mother’s Day photo actually came from

The internet has cooked up yet another theory about that photo of Kate Middleton.

If you've been out of the loop on this one, people have been wondering where the Princess of Wales is since she went into hospital for planned abdominal surgery and has hardly been seen since.

While Kensington Palace said she'd be taking a significant amount of time out to recover, the internet has fired up the conspiracy engine and started hammering out suggestions.

Theories on what procedure she'd actually had and whether it was all just an elaborate ruse for something else were thrown around as the denizens of the net decided that something was very amiss with all of this.

In an attempt to alleviate tensions Kensington Palace posted a photo of Kate and her three children, along with a Mother's Day message.

However, this only added fuel to the fire as people noticed certain discrepancies in the photo which led to numerous news agencies taking it down.

Kate then released a statement claiming she'd edited the photo, saying: "Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.

"I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.

"I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C"

If she thought this would stop the theories, it really hasn't and now the internet has seized another opportunity to cook up another theory.

This time it's the idea that the picture of Kate and her kids has been so photoshopped that it's not even her in the picture, and her face has been lifted from another photo of her.

The theory goes that Kate's face in the picture is identical to what she looked like in a photoshoot for a Vogue magazine cover years ago.

Ergo (at least according to this latest conspiracy) that's an old photo of Kate being used like it's new to give us the impression all is fine and dandy.

Alternatively the two pictures look very similar because they're photos of the exact same woman who is used to being photographed so much that she has a set facial expression for photoshoots.

Graphic designer Josh Sandhu told LADbible his take on the image.

“These sorts of things happen, but it's a bit of surprise that no eyes caught the errors when it was sent to the press. In my opinion, what happened here is evidently there's multiple shots here to produce a composite image,” he claimed.

“They have likely picked the best shot from Kate's face and the children's faces, then stitched things together in Photoshop."

While he said this 'isn't unusual', he did admit it was 'odd' that it wasn't caught before it went out as the picture would have been 'approved multiple times by the Royal Family and their team'.