Removed from the Picture

When Photoshop hasn't been invented yet,
you have to make do.

Bob's relationship with Alice has fallen through, and he never wants to see her face again. Rather than just throw away all the pictures with her in them, he burns, cuts, tears, or marks over her face in every single photograph of Alice he has, or maybe just one really important one, like a wedding photo.

Alternatively, Alice is Bob's Stalker with a Crush, and has several photos of Bob and his girlfriend Carol, with Carol's face burned, cut, marked over, torn out, or otherwise mutilated, sometimes with her own face glued in. The photos may even be pasted all over a Room Full of Crazy. In these cases, it may not be that Alice actively hates Carol, just that she thinks that she deserves Bob more. (Or maybe she does actively hate Carol after all.)

Unperson is this being done for political reasons. Compare Burn Baby Burn, Paper Destruction of Anger, and Stab the Picture for when the entire photo is burned, pulped, shredded, etc., not just Alice's face. Someone being removed from a Family Portrait of Characterization can be a sign of dislike or disinheritance.

Compare Convenient Photograph (which is technically an inverse, because that trope is about what's in the photograph). However, they can overlap if the removal itself is convenient and/or the missing piece reveals a plot-relevant aspect.

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Examples:

Bob Hates Alice

Advertising

• There's a commercial for Dell computers where it shows a series of pictures of a guy with his girlfriend. Midway through the commercial, it stops at one picture being shown in Windows Vista's picture app. The app then goes and crops the guy's girlfriend out of the pic. As you might guess, it reveals the guy sitting at a Dell PC doing this. (At the end where it shows off the PC, its monitor is showing a picture montage of the same guy and his new girlfriend.)

Anime & Manga

• In Afro Samurai: Resurrection, Sio's photograph of herself, Jinno, her vassals, and Afro has Afro's face burned out of it.
• Overlapping with Mustache Vandalism in one chapter of Love Hina when Kitsune shows Keitaro a picture of her, Naru, Haruka, and Seta in which Seta's face has been drawn over almost completely with a Sharpie. Kitsune explains that she did that in anger after Seta took off for an overseas trip without so much as a goodbye to the girls, breaking Naru's heart in the process.

Comic Books

• In Maus, as Art's father relates what happened to his family members that survived the Holocaust, he mentions how one of his brothers committed suicide when his lover left him. As he says it, we see a picture of that brother with the woman in question, her face burned out.
• In Persepolis, Marjane hears her Communist uncle speaking about his time in the USSR and how he married a local woman, showing a picture of the couple where her face is burnt off, implying they split.
• Ignacia of Wildguard uses her heat vision to burn her own face from a photo after a particularly crappy day.

Fan Works

• Boldores And Boomsticks: Salem has an immaculately-kept portrait of her family... except for the hole over Ozma's face.
• Sophistication and Betrayal: Both Rarity and Cashmere retain their photograph of the day Carousel Boutique opened. Yet while Rarity keeps her copy of the picture intact as a reminder of the good times, Cashmere completely removes Rarity from her copy.

Film — Animated

• In Coco, Miguel's family has a photo of Mama Coco as a little girl with her father's face torn out, a symbol that they never forgave him for abandoning them to pursue a music career. When Miguel accidentally breaks the frame, he discovers a hidden fold on the photo with a uniquely-designed guitar on it, convincing him that his great-great-grandfather is famous musician Ernesto de la Cruz. It later turns out that his actual great-grandfather is Hector, which is proven when Coco reveals that she kept the torn part with his face, with her memory of him being what's maintained Hector's existence in the Land of the Dead, and only by restoring it to the family ofrenda before her death will he be able to remain.

Film — Live-Action

• Funeral Parade of Roses: We see several repeated shots, in extreme close-up, of a cigarette burning a man's face out of a photo. Eventually it's revealed that Eddie's mother is burning Eddie's father's face out of a family photo, the father having abandoned the family 15 years before when Eddie was a small child. While this is meant to illustrate that the mother still burns with hatred for the father after all these years, it's also a Chekhov's Gun that is crucial to The Reveal.
• The Karate Kid Part III: When Daniel is getting to know Jessica Andrews, he finds a photo of her rock-climbing, with another man whose head has been torn from a photo of them together.
• A strange case is employed in Lovely Molly where Molly has cut out the horse heads in the photographs in her father's office and pasted them over his head in the family album.
• The Muppets (2011) reveals that after Kermit and Miss Piggy parted ways, Miss Piggy kept half of a photograph of their wedding in Manhattan Melodies. It eventually turns out that Kermit kept the other half. They show the pieces to each other backstage during the telethon.
• In One Hour Photo, Sy has an entire wall of pictures of the Yorkin family. When he discovers that Will Yorkin cheated on his wife, he scratches Will's face off the pictures.
• In That Thing You Do!, Faye tags along when her boyfriend Jimmy's band has its big break and goes on tour, but Jimmy's eye starts to wander as he meets female singers on the road, while the drummer, Guy, gets progressively more upset as he realizes he's in love with Faye. After Jimmy angrily walks out on Faye and Guy comforts her, Faye cries over a picture of Jimmy, her, and Guy sitting together (and Jimmy, just to make the point is looking away in the picture) and snips off the left part of the picture with Jimmy in it, leaving just her and Guy. The trimmed picture is used in the what happened afterwards credits accompanying confirmation that Guy and Faye lived Happily Ever After.

Literature

• In the Midst of Winter: After Lucía's father dies, her mother learns about his Secret Other Family and her grief turns to anger. She destroys all his pictures (except a few her son manages to hide from her), gets rid of all his belongings, stops seeing all their common friends, and even cuts contact with his side of the family. She doesn't forbid the kids from talking about him but discourages it.
• Paprika: Dr. Tokita's face is cut out from one of Himuro's pictures.
• Defied in Shaman Blues — when Konstancja asks Witkacy why he hadn't cut her out of their picture together, he answers that if he'd done so, he couldn't've found a frame that the picture would fit to.
• In Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen, Joey, having survived attempted murder by her husband (who believes her dead, as do the authorities), secretly returns to his house and, using cuticle scissors, cuts herself out of a wedding picture, which she places under his pillow. Her confidant Mick Stranahan immediately recognizes this as a typical feminine ploy; apparently, it happened to him with his third wife.

Live-Action TV

• Cordelia does this when she breaks up with Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• Frasier:
  • Subverted in "Beloved Infidel" when Frasier and Niles look through some photo albums and notice pictures of their father with a woman who's been cut out. Niles' diary entries from the time mention their parents fighting a lot, so they conclude that Martin had an affair with the woman in the pictures. Martin eventually explains that he didn't have an affair, the pictures originally had the boys' mother in them but she cut herself out after a relative made fun of her weight.
  • A portrait of Niles and Maris (unseen, of course). Following their separation, Niles hits the roof when he discovers he's been painted out with a tree. Well, not quite — Frasier, wincing, tells Niles not to look at the face of the skunk in the undergrowth.
• The IT Crowd has a heartbroken Roy perfectly photoshop his ex out of all of their photos, hilariously leaving him alone on a seesaw, etc...
• On Living Single episode "The Naked Truth", Kyle and Overton have a falling out which results in the former moving in with the girls. When displaying pictures of the two friends, Overton carefully cut out Kyle from them all, including the outline of them posing back-to-back and a far-away crowd shot of them at a baseball game where he uses a hole puncher to clip him out of the picture.

Music

• A variation, though with a band rather than a couple: On the panorama that forms the cover of The Beatles Anthology CDs and DVDs, there's a poster of the band in their early days with Pete Best's face torn out.

Video Games

• The Torn Photo passive item in The Binding of Isaac is, as the title says, a ripped photograph where only Isaac and his mother are visible. From several implications of other items and events in the game, the missing piece had Dad on it. When he picks it up, Isaac looks downright heartbroken.
• One of the last chapters of the interactive indie game Florence deals with the titular character's divorce, where she then rips out her ex-husband from the photo she took with him when they first started dating before leaving for good.

Web Comics

• Cirque Royale: Red sees the wedding picture of Penelope and her ex-husband, Benjamin. Being obsessed with prince and princess stories) she innocently asks Penelope if Benjamin was her "Prince Charming." Penelope suffers through a short (but intensely seen) Flash Back of one of the many times Benjamin badly abused her to the point she had to miss a family event, and she rips the picture of the two of them apart and says "no" emphatically.

Western Animation

• Skulker in Danny Phantom crushes a picture of his girlfriend, Ember after she criticized his hunting skills. He spent the rest of the episode trying to prove otherwise, but whether they got back together is never concluded.
• Futurama: In "The Why of Fry", Leela, after she realized the guy she went on a date with was a jerk, gives Bender a picture of him to incinerate with one of his fire-burps. This results in a hole where his face was, and just that second, Fry comes in and Leela sees his face through the hole.

Alice Loves Bob

Anime and Manga

• At the end of the first episode of Ask Dr. Rin!, Tokiwa's first appearance shows him looking at a photo of Meirin with Asuka's face scribbled out. He spends the next few episodes alternately trying to steal Meirin's affections, kill Asuka, or both.
• Usagi-chan de Cue!!: At the start of chapter 3, Miku is wearing a bath towel, and admiring a framed photo of herself next to Haru, who's being hugged by Mimika. Miku positions a beverage glass in front of the photo, obscuring most of Mimika, which is a Downplayed Trope. With only the faces of Miku and Haru visible, Miku begins trying out various come-on lines to get Haru to ask her out.

Comic Books

• Spider-Man: In The Death of Jean DeWolff, Spidey is looking through Jeanne's belongings after she was murdered (in search of clues and finds that she's saved just about every picture of Spider-Man taken... And cut out pictures of his (then GF) Black Cat (although they had broken up by the time Jean was murdered.)

Fan Works

• With this Ring... (Green Lantern): As investigating the disappearance of Carol Ferris and her suitor Hal Jordan, private detective Jonny Double check Carol's house and finds a picture of Hal Jordan slashed by Carol's villainous stalker the Predator.
  Double pushed two rows of clothes aside from a closet rack and stopped dead when he saw what was on the wall behind them.
  It was a picture of Hal Jordan, in his flight gear. A headshot, smiling.
  The picture, and the wall around it, was scored with triple diagonal cut marks that formed an X, meeting in the center of the photo. The cuts were evenly-spaced as if three barber's razors had been strapped together to do the job.

Film — Live-Action

• Shows up in the Exploitation F Ilm, Don't Stop My Crazy Love For You, where the Villain Protagonist Stalker with a Crush Freddy secretly keeps a photo of Kitty, the young woman he had a one-sided crush on, with her boyfriend Michael. The moment Freddy finds out Kitty and Michael are engaged, he immediately cuts an oval out of Michael's face. Foreshadowing that Freddy will later ambush and brutally kill Michael in the engagement party...
• When Julia and Larry come to the house in Hellraiser, Julia finds a photo of Frank and another woman among his possessions. She tears off the corner with the woman on it and keeps the part with Frank.

Literature

• A variation in Harry Potter: Severus Snape, finding a photo of Lily and James Potter with a year-old Harry, tore off and kept the side with Lily, leaving the side with James and Harry for Harry to find.
  • Speaking of Deathly Hallows, Hermione does this to herself in the movie by using magic so that she fades away in all her pictures.

Live-Action TV

• An early episode of Castle has the titular writer-sleuth realize that a photo of the family she works for in the home of a nanny is the same as the photo he saw in the family's home, except with the mother cropped out of the picture so it looks like the father, the nanny, and the kids are a standard nuclear family. Of course, this is a clue that the nanny did it.
• Kat in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, back in her Dark Action Girl days. She tore a picture of Tommy and Kim, in half, and kept the half with Tommy in it.
• In Season 3 of The Office (US), Michael dates a single mother named Carol, but she breaks up with him when he takes an old photo of her on a ski trip with her family, edits himself into her ex-husband's place, and mails it as a Christmas card to everyone he knows.

Visual Novels

• In SHUFFLE!, after Rin and Asa start going out together, Primula finds some photos of Rin and Asa together, and notices that in each one, Kaede has drawn over Asa's face with a pen. She makes it downstairs just as Kaede starts attacking Asa in a jealous rage.

Western Animation

• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Carl has a Precocious Crush on Jimmy's mother, Judy. In "The Junkman Cometh", it's shown that he has a photo of Judy and her husband with a photo of his face taped over her husband's.
• In the Family Guy episode "Back to the Woods", James Woods steals Peter's identity and tapes a picture of his head over Peter's in a wedding photo with him and Lois. Humorously, it's a live-action photograph of Woods!
• Fry does this to a picture of Lars and Leela in Futurama: Bender's Big Score.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), Karai has a picture given to her by the Shredder of her mother. It's torn in half; seeing the full picture in Splinter's lair convinces her that Splinter is, in fact, her actual father. In this case, it's implied to be Shredder who tore the picture, as he desired Karai's mother and hated her father.
• X-Men: Happens to the same guy, in two different continuities:
  • In X-Men: The Animated Series, Wolverine keeps a picture of Jean and Scott in his room that has Scott's face sliced out.
  • X-Men: Evolution: In Fred Duke's (a.k.a The Blob) debut episode, Fred - with a one-sided crush on Jean - rips a photo of Jean and Scott together in half, keeping the part with Jean for himself while stomping the part with Scott underfoot.

Non-Romantic

Anime and Manga

• Kallen Kouzuki from Code Geass thinks that her Japanese mother has become a slave to the Britannians out of fear and cowardice, so she places a sticker on their family picture that covers Mrs. Kouzuki's face. When Kallen sees that her mom actually chose slavery for her, she takes the sticker off.
• In Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Domon Kasshu goes around showing half a photograph to people and asking if they've seen the man depicted therein. A few episodes later we learn that "that man" is in fact his older brother Kyoji, who is responsible for the death of their mother and the imprisonment of their father only not really, and that the second half of the photograph shows the family together and happy; young Domon is even sitting on Kyoji's shoulders.
• Porco Rosso has destroyed or vandalized all pictures that show him as a human as a sign of the guilt, despair, and self-loathing that may have turned him into a pig in the first place.

Comic Books

• In Maus, we see family photos where the faces of those who fought in the Nazi army were clipped out.
• In a Mickey Mouse Comic Universe story, Mickey finds a picture of his aunt with her three brothers, one of which, that he didn't previously know of, has the head cut off. It's later discovered that the third brother was the gangster John Cyril Rattinger, and his father removed him from all pictures upon discovering he had become a criminal. The now elderly and reformed Rattinger has the last intact copy of the same picture... And cuts himself out upon accepting he can't just go to Mickey and tell him he's his uncle.
• Rivers of London: In Night Witch, Lesley May has a photo of herself and Peter Grant from their graduation with her own face scribbled out, implied to be due to a combination of trauma over what happened to her face and internal conflict over her decision to join the Faceless Man.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1987): After Vanessa has been Mind Raped into resenting and hating Diana and Cassie by Dr. Psycho and Circe Cassie finds old pictures of Vanessa and Diana in Nessi's room with Diana's face scratched out.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Done symbolically on the cover of #230, with Cheetah clawing Wonder Woman's face off a poster, while inside she tries to kill WW herself.

Film — Animated

• Inverted at the end of Lilo & Stitch; the first part of the credits ends with a shot of the photograph of Lilo and Nani with their deceased parents, with a cut-out of Stitch strategically placed so that it looks like he's sitting with them, symbolizing that he's now part of their ohana.

Film — Live-Action

• In the Apocalypse film series movie Tribulation, Calvin Canboro has his sister Eileen photoshopped from the family photo he has with her and their brother Tom since she had been Caught Up in the Rapture.
• The photo in Back to the Future, where changes in the timeline cause the disappearance first of Marty's older siblings, then of Marty himself in a photo that Marty brought from 1985 to 1955. There is no emotional reason for this change of course, nor is it caused by any human agency, just the timeline.
• The Eiger Sanction. Jonathan Hemlock shows Jemina a framed photograph taken when he served with the US Special Forces during the Vietnam War. She notes that the face of a soldier with Hemlock has been crossed out, and he explains that it's Miles Mellough, a Double Agent who betrayed them.
• At the start of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione erases herself from all family photos when she wipes her parents' memories of her.
• Home Movie has this trope prominently displayed on the cover, which depicts a desecrated photo the father finds in his psycho kids' clubhouse.
• Sy in One Hour Photo does this to all the pictures he's collected of his favorite family, when he discovers the father is an adulterer.
• Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the Bellows' daughter who was accused of witchcraft and was excluded from her family was taken out of the family photos.
• Spider-Man: No Way Home: The effects of Peter being forced to collectively erase everyone's memories of him as Peter Parker are shown in the Extended Cut's post-credit scene, which shows photos and video footage from the first two films edited to crop him out of frame or insert an object in the foreground to cover his face.
• Uncle Buck: The title character is the Black Sheep of the family, whose brother reluctantly calls him in to watch the children in an emergency. Buck is mostly a congenial Manchild but has a moment of quiet melancholy when he sees that he's been removed from all the family photos, including his brother's wedding picture.
• Colt in Visiting Hours has a copy of the wedding picture of his parents, which has the side with his mother torn out since she hurt his father badly before disappearing.
• After Nina is honour-murdered by her family in When Darkness Falls, they destroy all photos of her and trash them.

Literature

• In Among Others, Mori goes to live with her father after she and her sister have a fight with their mother that ends with the sister dead and Mori seriously injured. After Mori's mother finds out where she's gone, she starts sending Mori old family photos with Mori burned out of them. Since Mori's mother is a witch, there's more to this than just an expression of her feelings.
• In The Demonata, in the second book, Kernel finds a photo of his brother and him in his mother's room... except he is scrawled out of the photo.

Live-Action TV

• Criminal Minds: Maeve's Stalker without a Crush had surveillance-style photos of her with Maeve's face scribbled out. While Reid recognizes the implications of wanting to obliterate Maeve, JJ spots something else, the stalker used eyeliner instead of a pen or marker, meaning the stalker is female.
• Zigzagged, inverted, then zigzagged some more hilariously in an episode of Seinfeld. George sees a family photo in his boss's office and notices himself in the background of it. He then remembers that he had met his boss long ago before he started working there. He was at the beach and when he came in from swimming, he noticed that all his stuff was gone. He accused the family who had set up next to him of stealing it and threw their boom box into the ocean as revenge. It was then that he noticed all his stuff was out in the ocean too. It wasn't stolen after all, the tide had merely washed it out. The father of the family (who is now his boss) angrily demanded George replace the boom box, but George gave him a fake name and address to avoid having to pay. Present-day George is now terrified that it's only a matter of time before his boss looks at that photo, recognizes him, and fires him over what happened that day. He steals the photo and takes it to a photo lab to have himself airbrushed out, but the photo lab mistakenly airbrushes out his boss instead. Apparently, due to past-George's full head of hair, the employee didn't recognize him in the photo and thought his boss was George due to them both being bald. George makes them fix their mistake, but when it comes back, his boss is now a cartoonish drawing since they don't have another photo of him to edit in. George then stages a fake cancer screening at his office in order to get another photo of his boss with his shirt off to match the original. With the photo finally to his liking, George sneaks it back into his boss's office. The next time George is called into his boss's office, the photo happens to come up and George's boss tells him all about the day he and his family went to the beach and they screwed with this dumb, fat loser by throwing all his stuff into the ocean while he was out swimming. George becomes enraged and declares that he was the fat loser, and was in the photo but stole it and had himself airbrushed out. Turns out, his boss also didn't recognize him in the photo because of his past self's full head of hair, meaning George's entire quest to have himself airbrushed out was pointless.
• In the finale of The Shield, after Vic has betrayed Ronnie and an on-the-run Shane has committed murder-suicide with his family, we see Vic putting a photo on his new desk that just shows him with Curtis "Lem" Lemansky, the only member of the team that he didn't betray or didn't betray him. The photo originally showed all four of the team together, but Ronnie and Shane were cut out.
• Veronica Mars: In the first season episode "Meet John Smith", Veronica takes the case of a freshman boy who wants her to find his father, who is presumed dead but is apparently still alive, but what makes the case tough is, among other things, all the pictures the boy has of his father have the father's face either cut or scratched out by the mother. It turns out the man has transitioned into being a woman - the same woman who has been renting movies from the video store the boy works at.
• The X-Files episode "Eve" ends with a rather horrifying inversion of the traditional "remove spouse, leave the children": Mrs Reardon rips up a family photo and burns the half that shows her daughter. Little Cindy Reardon killed her own dad.

Theme Parks

• Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Disneyland: In the pre-show segment set to the song, "Two Brothers," a family portrait is shown several times. Both sons disappear from the family portrait when they go off to fight in the Civil War (on opposite sides); the one who came back alive reappears in the family portrait, at the end of the segment.

Video Games

• In Days Gone, one of the collectibles you can find is a photo of Deacon, Boozer, and Jessie Williamson/Carlos back when they were all in the Mongrels together, but with the first two’s faces scratched out.
• A fourth character was originally planned for LucasArts' The Dig, and the game's box art was originally drawn with four characters in space suits, but when the fourth character was dropped, the box art was altered to show only three characters - though the cover of the novelization in audiobook format still shows the old four-character version.
• Fuga: Melodies of Steel: If any of the young protagonists are sacrificed to power the Soul Cannon, any artwork that would have originally included them is altered, filling the space where they originally would have been with a black scribble.
• Near the beginning of Half-Life 2, Dr. Kleiner accesses his experimental teleporter by straightening a picture on a wall. If you take a close look at the picture, it's a group shot of Gordon Freeman and the rest of the Black Mesa Anomalous Materials team, with Dr. Wallace Breen's face whited out and then crossed out. Of course, Breen is currently The Quisling for a totalitarian, poverty-stricken Earth, so some animosity is to be expected.
• The photographs in Irisu Syndrome! look normal at the beginning of the game, but are mutilated over the course of the plot. Characters who've vanished and are probably dead are blacked out. Getting a better score and preventing one character's death returns her picture to normal. Getting an even better score reveals she probably died in a different way, and whites out her picture instead. Getting a high score in the expansion pack saves her again and returns the picture to normal again.
• In OMORI, the photo album in the real world with Sunny and his friends has his deceased sister Mari blacked out of every image she is in entirely. (This can also be seen in the Dream Land version of the album, though it's much less obvious there.) Aubrey's aggression toward Basil is because she assumes he did it for some reason. It was actually Sunny himself who did it to repress his memories of Mari, whom he feels guilt for accidentally killing during a heated argument.
• Persona 5: One of the game's Arc Villains is Ichiryuusai Madarame, an artist whose most famous work is a painting called "Sayuri", which depicts a woman looking down and smiling, with the bottom of the painting covered up by purple fog. It turns out that, like most of his work, Madarame plagiarized "Sayuri" from one of his students, and the original painting was a self-portrait depicting the artist holding her newborn son Yusuke. Following her death, Madarame painted over the baby and claimed the work as his own, both to obscure the true origin of the painting and invoke a Mona Lisa Smile situation that would bring the painting critical acclaim.
• In The Sinking City, Reed finds a picture of the Throgmorton family that's been torn in half—on one side, there's Francis Throgmorton holding his newborn son, Robert. On the other, there's Francis's wife and elder son. It turns out Francis's wife was not Robert's mother, just the oldest boy's. Robert's mother is heavily implied to have literally been some sort of ape or gorilla, and it seems Francis favored him, which led to him remove his older child from the line of inheritance and institutionalize his wife.
• In Undertale, completing the Genocide Route and then attempting a True Pacifist Run results in this. If you tell Toriel "I have places to be", the photograph of Frisk and their friends shown in the final scene changes — The faces of your friends are scribbled out in red marker, and Chara takes the place of Frisk in the photo.

Visual Novels

• The Fruit of Grisaia: On her route Michiru removes herself from all the pictures she has taken with the other girls of Mihama, symbolising how she given up on life and they are better off without her.
• In Hatoful Boyfriend, Kazuaki has a marked-out photograph of his dead brother Nageki, although his feelings towards the subject in the photo are far more complicated than simple love or hatred:
  Kazuaki: That was a photo of the most important bird in my life. I thought we could live through anything, just the two of us. But...one day I looked around, and I was alone. [...] As I looked at the photo every day, I realized I couldn't tell anymore. Couldn't tell if I felt love when I saw that face, or if...if I felt hatred. After a while, I couldn't stand to see it anymore. But even as I tried to forget, some part of me didn't want to.
• In Snatcher, JUNKER mechanic Harry Benson has a photograph of himself when he was still a child that has the surrounding portion ripped out, omitting the faces of his supposedly dead parents. It later turns out that his parents are none other than Gillian and Jamie, the main character and his wife, who were kept in cryogenic sleep for decades and are now younger than their own child, who is now in his 50's.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: At the end of the episode "OZZIE'S", we see that Blitzo has at least two photos of himself with his coworkers at I.M.P hung up on the walls at home, except they both have Blitzo's face scribbled over, likely as an indication of how much he hates himself.

Webcomics

• Cirque Royale: Leo does this while drunk with a Former Friends Photo of him, Quinn, and Kingston after coming across the two of them hiding in the Sheep Kingdom (and overhearing that Quinn, who is pregnant with the twins, doesn't want to be found by anyone from Clowny Island); he has abandonment issues from his bad parents, and Quinn and Kingston unexpectedly leaving him behind and not letting him know where they went contributed. While they were all friends, he also had a crush on Kingston and was engaged to Quinn, so as Kingston put it, "It's complicated."
• Furry Experience: In the Thursday 4 February 2010 strip, Ronnie tears a photo of her then-boyfriend and herself right down the middle. She's not so much falling out of love with the boyfriend, as she's infuriated by the Mormons and their regimented services. She has to nix him as a dating prospect when he'd made it clear he put his devotion to his faith ahead of his feeling for Ronnie.
• In Satan and Me, Satan tears out Michael's face from Nat's pictures when he learns the guy's name.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: After failing to land a single prank on Gumball and Darwin, Richard proceeds to pretend to disown the two boys, to the point he cuts them out of a family picture.
• In one episode of Detentionaire, we are shown a picture of Alexander Nigma and his prize students (the future founders of Mann, Wurst, and Finnwich) which has a floating tuft of hair on one end. The tuft of hair belongs to resident Walking Spoiler Lo Ping, who defected after learning the true motives of the company's benefactor.
• The Flintstones: In "Room for Two", Fred smashes a stone engraving of Barney, which reads "My Pal, Barney Rubble", after he votes against him for Grand Poobah of the Water Buffalo lodge.
  Fred: That picture has got to go! It should read "My Pal, Barney Traitor!"
• In The Grossery Gang webseries, Gooey has a picture of Meathead and Ricardo, which he's taped a picture of himself on top of Ricardo's face. Gooey and Meathead have a...complicated friendship.
• In the The Looney Tunes Show episode, "French Fries", Daffy gets into a feud with Porky over who ordered the titular food at Pizzarriba when Porky eats some of it, as Daffy thinks that the fries came with his meatball sub, while Porky thinks they were for the table. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Porky was right. When Daffy ends his friendship with Porky, he rips him out of photos of them from Bugs' photo album. When Bugs finds Daffy doing this, he tells Daffy that most of the photos he ripped out are of him. Daffy tells him that he only had two photos of Porky, but by then, he was on a roll.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • Inverted in the episode "Dragon Quest"; Spike adds a cutout of himself to a group photo of the ponies once he realizes he considers them his family.
  • Played straight in "Bloom and Gloom"; one of Apple Bloom's nightmares involves her family disowning her when she gets a non-apple cutie mark, complete with them snipping her out of their photos.
• The Owl House:
  • "Understanding Willow": Amity attempts to remove herself from a photo of herself and Willow as kids with a fire spell so her Girl Posse won't see it. Unfortunately, the photo was directly linked to Willow's memories, so damaging it (and the other nearby photos by accident) gives Willow amnesia.
  • "Hollow Mind": All of the memory photos of Philip's childhood have his brother's eyes scratched out. It isn't until the episode gets to photos of his adulthood that the audience gets a good look at his face and sees that he looks just like Hunter. It's hinted that this is an extension of Philip denying the happier times they shared together as family on Earth, until he meets him again on the Boiling Isles and now recognised him as an 'enemy who betrayed him', hinted to be a coping mechanism to deal with the fact he violently murdered his beloved brother over his own bigoted views and secretly keeps trying to justify the act to himself. As an extension of that, he refuses to refer to him as his brother as all, merely an 'old friend' that he hopes the Grimwalkers will become a 'better version' of.
  • "Thanks to Them": When all the characters are putting up drawings of their families, Amity's only features her father and older siblings, as she had disowned Odalia after learning that she was complicit with Belos' plans for genocide in "Clouds on the Horizon".

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