iOS 17.5.1 to fix photo resurrecting bug

Recently, Apple launched a new version of iOS (and iPadOS) to fix a peculiar bug that some users encountered over the past week. When iOS 17.5 was originally released, certain individuals noticed that photos they had erased were mysteriously reappearing in their Photos app - the newly issued iOS 17.5.1 promises to resolve this problem.

As explained by Apple, the update "addresses an uncommon problem where photos that had data corruption could show up again in the Photos library even after being deleted."

The issue resulted from a small number of photos being impacted by a corrupted database entry, making it possible for the photo to not fully delete from the device..

As reported by some Reddit users that were seeing old photos pop up that they had not only deleted weeks ago, but even months or years prior. Indeed, one person reported seeing photos dating all the way back to 2010 suddenly appearing in their library as if they had just been taken.

Some questioned if Apple still had access to deleted photos due to a bug, but Apple clarified in release notes that this was not intended behavior and it was not a purposeful design choice.

Instead, Apple explained the fix as repairing how the photo library handles deletions, to ensure records of deleted photos are accurate and prevent already-deleted photos from reappearing.

The photo deletion process is meant to work like this: users delete photos, which go to the Recently Deleted album, then get permanently deleted after 30 days. Users can also manually delete images from Recently Deleted before 30 days to permanently erase them right away.

The resurfacing of supposedly deleted photos was not caused by Apple secretly keeping them, but rather by a bug that happened on the iPhone itself without iCloud's involvement. When you delete a file on flash storage like the iPhone's, the file isn't truly erased - just marked as reusable space. The original data remains until new data overwrites it, which is why specialized software can recover "deleted" files. Even so, deleted photos shouldn't reappear in the Photos app. Apple says this rare occurrence was due to a glitch with a corrupted database that prevented some photos from being fully deleted as expected. This issue was uncommon though, and has been fixed in the iOS 17.5.1 update.

The update comes one week after iOS 17.5 first became available. iOS 17.5 includes new games for News+ subscribers, the 2024 Pride wallpaper, cross-platform tracking detection, and more changes for Digital Markets Act compliance in the EU.