There rarely were any "technically savvy" people taking UFO pictures. It is very easy to fake them. Case in point, I was 13 years old when I faked mine and I had already picked up on forced perspective even though I had never heard about it. I knew nothing about photography at the time, had seldom actually taken a picture and was using my father's Polaroid camera.
Point that "UFO photos can be faked" neither proves nor disproves existence of UFOs.
Everything can be faked, including elections
I digress, but 2 years ago a huge and damaging debate was raging in social sciences because somebody tried to repeat lots of classic experiments and 50% of them failed. Lots of researchers in social sciences distort proper statistics through so called "P-hacking". So, OK, we live in the world where everybody is faking and everything can be faked. Then, the question is, what can one do to get to the bottom of the things?
So, in order to challenge faker what one can do is simply to rise the bar. Instead of looking at only one aspect of the UFO case, one takes multidisciplinary approach and looks from all the aspects available to human knowledge. OK, one can glue a UFO paper cutout on a window glass, but ping on a radar from local airport is a bit more difficult to fake. And there are many such cases where whit multidisciplinary overlap. A way to verifying UFO cases is about ticking as many boxes as one can.
You are right about many things. I too first look at perspective and lighting of the scene when deciding about truthfulness of UFO picture.
But what makes me decide about UFO photo is not UFO photo, but the overall context of that situation. First, I take into account soft-proof or low-hanging-fruit, like social aspects: witness' character, presence of other witnesses, similarity with established trends in other UFO sightings etc.
Second, and by far the most importantly, I take into account the-real-stuff or hard-proofs, like: any physical effect, any electrodynamics or general relativity effects. Although appearance of UFO is a transient event, still the very presence of these electrodynamics and general relativity effects increases veracity of testimony because very few people understand science and these effects are not common in everyday life.
90% of UFO researchers are totally ignorant and only judge a highly scientific UFO event with only geometry and mechanics, aka "common sense". I keep on repeating this and people keep on ignoring it:
common sense is only 1/4 of reality. People who are researching UFOs are lazy lot and they don't want to make an effort to familiarise themselves with a bit of physics, instead they go for trivial stuff that is highly politicised, like government documents. I am not physicist myself, but at least I made an effort to understand basics of how how electrodynamics and general relativity operate. There are tons of simplified educational videos on YouTube and one can understand enough in a matter of weeks.
Anybody who's only using "common sense" is missing 3/4 of reality and his judgement can be ignored. This is what "reality" is in a current grasp of the human scientific knowledge, from the bottom to the top:
1.
Quantum Mechanics
2. geometry and mechanics.
3.
Electrodynamics ( light, radio waves, electricity etc. )
4.
General Relativity.
As you can see, if one is ignoring Electrodynamics & General Relativity one is missing 50% of UFO information. Most quantum mechanics effects can't be observed without special instruments and it can be forgiven.
Questions is,
if one is ignoring 50% of the available information can his opinion even be relevant??? It's literary like, what can a blind person tell you about a colour of the flower he has in his hand?