That however can be explained.
The pictures are scanned from old physical records and then uploaded, perhaps in bulk, by an organization such as a university, city council, government, etc.
I would expect that some employee with Photoshop will be properly editing those scans to make them suitable for websites. They have to be.
It is a possibility that some clerk could doctor a bit the old images for web view removing personal information from them before posting, but using Photoshop for such a simple task is not efficient in my opinion. There are far more simple Freewares like Gimp and others which do exactly that, remove watermarks and whatnot for free. Simply put, there is no need for a specialized commercial photo editing software like Photoshop. IMO it doesn't add up, but of course, there might be exceptions to my way of thinking.
And if you take a look at my previews posts in this thread you'll see that some images are composites, those were populated artificially with people and buildings. The contrast of the added parts is highly noticeable even for a non expert photo forensic eye like mine.
Here are two examples of it from
Monovision website only.
If those little people are not copy-pastes from other photos, then I don't know what to say. Just take a look at the giant people who are part of the real ship photo which was edited. Look at the sunset and it's reflection on the sea. Does that look like original?
Same thing here. It's a composite image saved as a Photoshop file. And a lot of old photos from the 19th Century are added daily to this website, many are as recent as 2022 or 2023.
Before posting these images here I removed file properties meta-data from them, but anyone can check what I'm saying for themselves by downloading other images and see that Photoshop was used indeed and I don't think it was a simple procedural thing, it just doesn't add up.
Playing devil's advocate is fine, I do it myself some times on ideas and things that I'm not fully convinced.
