Hoax #Sandy photos flooding social media (pictures)

With a storm like Hurricane Sandy, there will be no shortage of jaw-dropping images of destruction and once-in-a lifetime cloud formations. So you'd think there's no need to be spreading fake photos. Yet that's just what is happening -- everywhere you look online, and in social feeds on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, a group of easily debunked images are spreading like wildfire.

This image, which purports to show the hurricane menacing New York City, is actually a composite of a picture of a tornado storm cell in Nebraska and one of the Statue of Liberty, according to Snopes.com.

This photo seems to suggest that soldiers guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery won't leave their posts for any reason. But according to the Army regiment that does the guarding, the photo is actually from September.

In a round-up of some of the imagery making the rounds on social media, The Atlantic pulled no punches is making its assessment of the photo of the soldiers.

Though the previous photo of soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery was fake, the regiment that guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier posted this one, which was taken today, and makes the same point as the fake image everyone has seen.

This image appears to show a McDonalds in Virginia Beach, Va., flooded up to the level of the restaurant's counters. But by all accounts, this is a fake photograph.

Though appearing to be a news photograph from New York's NY1, this is actually a still image from the film "The Day After Tomorrow," according to Is Twitter Wrong.

Though many fake photos are making the rounds today, this one from Red Hook, in Brooklyn, N.Y., is for real, according to The Atlantic.

There are a number of images floating around showing this crane in New York City crumbling during the storm. By all accounts, this one is for real.