"A picture is worth a thousand words."

One common attribution for this adage's origin is to advertising executive Fred R. Barnard. Undoubtedly, he popularized it in the dawn of early mass communications a hundred years ago.

A few years before that, New York Evening Journal editor Arthur Brisbane told an advertising club in 1911: "Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words." For ads, it's been a proven truth. Watching something says way more than describing it in writing.

As video technology blossomed--and Internet platforms for sharing videos did, too--the saying was improvised to reflect the reality that a video's worth is even greater. Industry number-crunchers even tried to devise actual numerical counts. One researcher's calculation (based on studies of digital marketing metrics) claimed a few years back that one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.

The market value of imagery is esoteric, however. For the great mass and majority of people, the worth of a picture or video is determined by whether or not it is true.

When widely available image-manipulation technology first appeared in the form of Adobe Photoshop, nearly 40 years ago, there were rumblings about not being able to fully trust what you see in photographs anymore.

But digitally retouched photos were often easily recognized. Close........

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