On 13 May Apple shipped iOS 17.5, a routine update with 15 security fixes and a useful new alert for unknown Bluetooth trackers. Within days a less routine story surfaced on Reddit and X: after installing it, people were finding photos in their library that they had deleted — not last month, but in 2021, and in one account 2010. Several of the returned images were the kind nobody wants back. Apple has so far said nothing.
Why this should be impossible
When you delete a photo on an iPhone it moves to Recently Deleted, sits there for 30 days, and is then removed. Nothing in the Photos app is supposed to retain it after that. So how can a picture from three years ago come back?
The likeliest explanation
“Deleted” in software rarely means the bytes are gone; it usually means the entry pointing to them was removed. Photos keeps a database describing every image and where its file lives. If the file was not actually erased — because a sync with iCloud interrupted the deletion, because a backup restore copied it back, or because a cloud copy survived in a shared album or a Mac’s library — the file can sit on the disk, orphaned, with nothing listing it. A major update that re-indexes the library (iOS 17.5 did, to build new search features) finds those orphans and, seeing no record that they were deleted, puts them back. That is a bug, but a bug in the index, not a sign that Apple keeps your deleted pictures on a server.
The more worrying variant, reported by a few, is photos reappearing on a device they had wiped and sold. If confirmed, that would mean the erase did not scrub the file storage — a far more serious matter, which is why Apple needs to explain.
What to do now
- Delete the returned photos again, then empty Recently Deleted manually (Albums → Recently Deleted → Select → Delete All).
- Check iCloud Photos on the web (icloud.com/photos) and the Recently Deleted album there, since a cloud copy can re-sync to the phone.
- Before selling any iPhone, use Erase All Content and Settings, which discards the encryption key for the whole storage — orphaned files become unreadable even if they physically remain.
Apple fixed the issue in iOS 17.5.1 a few days later, describing it as a database corruption problem that could restore photos which had not been fully deleted — and confirming no photos had been synced from anyone else’s device.
Source: Daily Mail, via Prothom Alo.
