On 13 May 2024 Apple shipped iOS 17.5, a routine update. Within days users on Reddit and X were reporting photos in their libraries that they had deleted years earlier — 2021 in many accounts, 2010 in one. Apple patched it on 20 May with iOS 17.5.1 and, several days later, explained what had gone wrong.
Putting the company's statement alongside the user reports is worth doing, because they do not cover quite the same ground.
What Apple said
In a statement given to 9to5Mac, Apple described the cause as a corrupt database entry in the device's file system. The iOS 17.5.1 release notes used the same phrase. Two further points came with it:
- iOS 17.5 included a migration routine that scanned the file system. Where it found image files, it added them to the photo library — including files that had no surviving record of having been deleted.
- The affected files lived on the device, not in iCloud. Apple was explicit that nothing was recovered from its servers, and repeatedly described the problem as rare, affecting a small number of users and a small number of photos.
Why a deleted photo can still be on the disk
This is the part most coverage skipped, and it is the reason the bug was possible at all.
Deleting a file in almost any operating system does not scrub the bytes. It removes the entry that points at them and marks the space as reusable. The Photos app keeps a database describing every image and where its file sits; "delete" means removing the row, and the file is erased separately. If that second step did not complete — an interrupted sync, a restore that copied a file back, a cloud copy surviving in a shared album — the file remains on the storage chip, orphaned, with nothing listing it.
A routine that indexes the file system directly, rather than reading the database, finds those orphans. Seeing no record that they were ever deleted, it files them as photos. That is a bug in the index, not evidence that Apple keeps deleted pictures.
Where the accounts diverge
Apple's framing is a device-local database fault. Several user reports, picked up by 404 Media and others, describe something harder to fit into that frame: photos appearing on an iPad that had been wiped and sold, and images surfacing on a new phone set up from a backup.
Apple's explanation does cover the second case — a corrupted entry can travel to another device through a file transfer or an iCloud backup restore, carrying the orphaned file with it. The first case is the one that was never fully resolved in public. If a device that had been erased could still surface a previous owner's photographs, that points at the erase rather than the database, and Apple did not address it directly.
The fairest reading is that the bug is explained and the sold-device reports are not disproved. They were few, and no mechanism was ever demonstrated — but no mechanism was ruled out either.
What to do with that
- Deleting files is not erasing a phone. Before selling or giving one away, use Settings → General → Transfer or Reset iPhone → Erase All Content and Settings. That discards the encryption key for the entire storage, so orphaned files become unreadable whether or not they are physically still there. The Android equivalent is a factory reset on an encrypted device, which is every modern handset.
- Check the cloud separately. A copy in iCloud Photos — including its own Recently Deleted album at icloud.com/photos — can re-sync to a device long after you thought the picture was gone.
- Empty Recently Deleted by hand rather than waiting out the 30 days, if the photo is one you actually care about.
Sources: Apple's statement to 9to5Mac; iOS 17.5.1 release notes; MacRumors; TechRadar; PhoneArena; and Prothom Alo's original report.
