It comes after intense scrutiny on the royal due to her extended absence following a hospital stay and the confirmation she doctored a photo that had been released to show the princess was in good health.

“She must be feeling absolutely miserable,” said long-time royal reporter Penny Junor on British news channel GB News.

But Ms Junor cautioned that the immense speculation surrounding Kate Middleton was in danger of becoming “bullying”.

On Monday, four of the world’s largest photo agencies removed a picture of the princess and her three children – released the day before – from their libraries.

Photo agencies supply media outlets with a range of images.

The Associated Press said the reason for deleting the photo was “at closer inspection it appears that the source has manipulated the image”.

“The photo shows an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand,” the agency said.

There were also a number of other seeming inconsistencies with the image of the mum and her smiling kids.

A day later, the Princess of Wales released an unprecedented statement tracing the blame for editing the image.

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she said. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

Metadata on the image showed it had been edited hastily on Friday and Saturday before its release.

Kate has not been fully seen in public since Christmas Day when she went to a church service with other members of the Royal Family.

In January she went to hospital for a “planned,” but unexplained, abdominal operation.

Kensington Palace said she would recuperate and wouldn’t resume official royal duties until after Easter.

Since then she has only been seen in two paparazzi shots, both murky. One of those was on Monday morning in a car with Prince William, hours after the snap scandal broke.

‘In danger of bullying’

There have been calls for the original photograph of Kate and the children to be released. Kensington Palace has said there are no plans to do that.

“Obviously the palace never want to feel pressured or pushed into doing something,” said Ms Junor, who has written extensively on the royals since the early 1980s.

“I do think that it would be a good idea do a little video clip on Instagram or something in a day or two.

“But I do think we are in danger of bullying a lady who is trying to recover from a very serious operation.”

Talking to the New York Post, the sources complained that Meghan and Harry would “have been annihilated” if they had handed out secretly Photoshopped images of themselves and their family.

“If Harry and Meghan had ever encountered the same issue they would have been annihilated. The same rules do not apply to both couples,” the source said.

“This isn’t a mistake that Meghan would ever make … she has a keen eye and freakish attention to detail.”