This Looks Shopped — Tropical scene with UFO, jet, ship, dolphin and nude woman captioned 'I think this might be photoshopped'

This Looks Shopped

2008image macroclassic

Published October 3, 2026

This Looks Shopped is an image macro built around the mock-expert catchphrase 'THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME,' used to call out suspected Photoshop fakes on 4chan and other image boards during the mid-to-late 2000s2. The gag parodies armchair image forensics, and the phrase outlived the macro to became shorthand for any clearly doctored picture.

catchphrase memes photoshop memes 4chan memes image macro memes late 2000s memes

Overview

The format pairs a picture of someone pointing at a computer monitor, or any suspicious-looking composite image, with the two-line caption 'THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME'2. The joke lands two ways. Sometimes the shop in the picture is painfully obvious, so the caption's confident deduction reads as redundant. Other times the image is a flawless edit, making the imaginary expert sound like a crank.

Variants swap the 'pointing at the screen' photo for stock images of magnifying glasses, forensic analysts and smug cartoon characters, while the caption stays mostly fixed. The core bit is the self-serious tone, especially the 'from seeing quite a few shops in my time' flex, which does the comedic work regardless of whether the attached picture is real or fake2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Image boards (4chan, FARK, Something Awful)
Date
2008

The exact origin of the catchphrase is unclear. The earliest documented appearance is an article cached from Metaeducation.com in 2003, which Know Your Meme flags as the first known use of the 'this looks shopped' wording in the sense that later anchored the macro2. The phrasing circulated on 4chan and similar boards through the mid-2000s before the full two-line macro template settled into its familiar shape.

The format got its own home in July 2008, when a graphic designer from New England launched the single-topic blog Thislooksshopped.com dedicated to posting examples2. That blog is widely treated as the point at which the macro moved from scattered forum reply to a named, collected format.

How It Spread

The macro circulated across the imageboard and forum circuit of the late 2000s, with regular posts on 4chan, FARK and Something Awful driving its recognition2. The dedicated Thislooksshopped.com blog that launched in July 2008 acted as an aggregator, bundling user submissions of both subtle and ham-fisted edits under the same caption so the gag could be enjoyed on repeat2.

The catchphrase broke containment during the May 2011 flap over a fake post-mortem photo of Osama bin Laden, which spread online after the Abbottabad raid. In a CNN report dated May 3, 2011, New York photographer Kenna Lindsay echoed the meme almost word-for-word, telling the network, 'I have seen a great number of poorly Photoshopped images in my time as a photographer and I can tell by the pixels that it is a fake'2. Having a working photographer paraphrase a 4chan macro to a cable-news audience signaled that the 'I can tell from the pixels' bit had leaked into general internet vocabulary.

Since then the full image macro has been a reliable callback whenever a hoax photo trends, and the shortened phrase 'I can tell from the pixels' is still used on its own as a reaction to any suspected fake12.

Timeline

2003

Earliest documented use of the phrase 'this looks shopped' appears in an article cached from Metaeducation.com[2].

2008-07

A New England graphic designer launches Thislooksshopped.com, a single-topic blog collecting examples of the macro[2].

2011-05-03

CNN quotes photographer Kenna Lindsay paraphrasing the catchphrase while debunking the fake Osama bin Laden death photo[2].

Frequently Asked Questions