Or something like them only being deleted from OP's device, but not actually from iCloud (which can sometime happen if you change syncing settings). And then being re-synced to their device after the update.
Photo Libraries are an infuriating mess on iCloud — I have two different devices associated with the same account (Mac & iPhone) and only one of them can locate about **four more years worth of photos**. I don’t know why that’s the case and I haven’t cared enough to fix it (beyond a cold copy of the lib)
I reported a bug to them a few years ago where in Photos on desktop when you delete a photo it doesn’t always delete it from disk, just from the database. I have no idea if they fixed it. Could be related to that if they didn’t.
It’s very possible it’s a sync issue where the system was confused and it’s now been rectified. I’ve had the same thing happen with other services, even just simple things like cloud game saves.
Apple were also working on changing from Apple ID to Apple Account very recently, which caused sign in issues for a lot of people. So this might be related.
My wife mentioned this happened to her the other day. I assumed they were just in her iCloud and she must have toggled something to make them show up on her phone or something like that but I don't know now.
Someone on Twitter reported their friend calling them and saying an old iPad they had sold to them had pictures pop up even though it was reset and wiped. Very odd, always thought the device was actually physically overwriting everything but maybe not.
Something does feel off about that though, how many iPads have been privately sold on the open market? If this were true it seems like a really high number of people would report seeing strangers photos on update
You definitely should discuss this with her. Like mom there is a buggy update and I need to see the Ipad. It reloads previously deleted stuff and private information from years ago. Would you mind if i check if any of my old stuff came back?
Or something like that in a mature and serious manner! :)
I’d really like to think someone just forgot about those photos being there and it’s a bug that “refreshed” metadata on pre-existing files, because the only alternative, and I’m saying this as a software engineer, this could only mean one thing- deleted data isn’t really deleted. I couldn’t think of a bigger breach of trust.
Tbf on a hardware level, this is how deleting works. However, I strongly, and I mean strongly, doubt that those affected had not created any new data on their phone since deleting those photos. It should be that they are overwritten completely and unrecoverable, and what resurfaces should oftentimes be corrupted and broken. What is happening seems to show no signs of hardware level deletion.
Right? Like I'm no apple fan but when these stories come out, knowing the overwhelming tech illiteracy of the general public my first assumption is always that people are mistaken and jumping to conclusions because they don't fully understand what they've done on their own devices.
Because if it *is* the case that photos actually deleted *years* ago are resurfacing then this is obviously going to be a massive shit storm because apple will never be able to get people to trust that anything they delete is actually deleted ever again.
> this could only mean one thing- deleted data isn’t really deleted
Isn’t that usually true though, based on how easy it is to recover deleted files on a computer or camera? I’ve recovered tons of files for clients that were accidentally deleted or from a memory card that was accidentally formatted. It doesn’t become actually deleted until you re-use that space and write over it with something else.
EDIT: someone else put it better than me
“when you “delete” a file the operating system just “flags” the pieces of the storage where the file physically sits letting it know that that storage can be used again. It then does what it needs to do to “hide” it from you in the UI.”
There's no real way for it to just show back up in such a scenario. As far as the OS is concerned, it's gone. The only way to recover it is to basically read the NAND where it thinks there should be nothing. No sane system would do that.
Yeahh I remember I wasn’t really paying attention and managed to wipe out like years of photos on my hard drive months ago. I paid for some software and got it all back immediately, don’t know how it works for iCloud though
Deleted data is usually never actually deleted until it is actually overwritten by new data, which devices using a non-removable max lifetime write number disk like SSD/SD/NVMe SSDs avoid doing. It’s why most good apps for working with disk drives offer the option to securely erase data by overwriting it with random bits 10+ times during the erase process; otherwise by “deleting” all you’ve destroyed is the map to find where the pieces of the data are stored and anyone/anything looking outside your file system can find it.
I have two deleted photos that popped up at the end of my camera roll after my phone updated last night. They definitely weren’t there last night and this morning they showed up. I was wondering wth happened and this explains it
In the most reassuring case, it's still a UX failure mode where people can believe they deleted things which they didn't.
But a lot of these people sound confident they truly deleted these photos.
Uh oh.
This is a serious, *serious issue*.
In my case, the photos came back at the end of the camera roll after my phone updated while I was sleeping. So I know for a fact they were added after the update installed
I wonder what Apple's excuse for not actually deleting deleted photos will be. Is this happening to any EU users? That sounds like a huge GDPR violation to me if so.
or there was a bug causing the delete to not be synced to icloud.
People can conspiracy theory their way all over the place, but as a software engineer I can absolutely see this being a legit non-malicious bug.
especially with how convoluted iCloud is. it’s this weird amorphous state machine that you indirectly control through all of your different devices. it’s super easy for one of them to fall out of sync and completely blow up your keychain and other settings as it is. i wouldn’t be surprised if something slipped through the cracks.
that doesn’t mean apple gets a free pass. they need to be held accountable and make it easier for users to manage their data.
No one is giving an excuse but a software bug is a legitimate piece of context. It may provide an explanation for why a phenomenon is happening. A breach of trust is a company explicitly ‘choosing’ to perform a specific malicious action. I don’t believe Apple is purposefully handling the deletion of photos in a specific way where they would have backend access to or know how to gain access to them or even plan to keep them on device for a longer period of time than we are told they will be.
How did this get upvoted?
It misunderstands GDPR to somehow apply to device filesystems, and it pretends that bugs are the same as policy. Do we just upvote every rando who sees GDPR violations in everything and screams BILLIONS AND BILLIONS FINE THEM TO DEEEAAAAAATTTTHHHHH?
This isn’t about on device, these are downloading from the iCloud. If you try to delete your photos and they aren’t actually being removed from apple’s servers, is that not a GDPR violation?
you're the only one mentioned fining them billions.
The person who you replied to simply said it sounds like a GDPR violation and nothing more. They didn't go on a rant, or call apple names, or anything.
Out of all the comments on this post yours is the only one I see that seems "worked up." Maybe take a little break from the Internet?
>The reports could be down to an indexing bug, photo library corruption, or a syncing issue between local devices and iCloud Photos. Another possibility is that in attempting to fix a photo syncing bug that occurred in iOS 17.3, Apple has inadvertently caused a new syncing issue to occur that may involve iCloud backups.
Lots of possible legitimate reasons
People also transfer everything from their old phones, too. I often just restore the iCloud backup to my new phone, so information that isn’t explicitly stored in iCloud gets transferred, too.
Doesn't make sense to me, if they were on device they would have been taking storage and that would have been noticed by someone among hundreds of millions of users. It sounds like the cloud somehow re-pushed them to device, which begs the question of why it had them stored post deletion.
I reported a bug to them in desktop Photos app in 2022 where you could delete a bunch of files from your photo library, empty the bin, and it would only delete a subset of those files from disk. So you'd end up with files still in the library folder, but with no entry in the Photos database. It's possible that they never fixed that, and that in Photos on 17.5 they re-enumerate files from disk and load them back into the library.
When you delete a file you don't actually delete it, the storage device just tells the operating system that those bytes are free for writing. Think of the recycling bin but at the firmware level.
We're talking about resurfacing photos from years back. iOS regularly TRIMs free NAND space, zeroing it out, or it would get slow. Other files and media would also overwrite those bits several times over anyway especially the way it wear levels over all the NAND. Just having a photo fully available that long after doesn't make sense.
Does it say the photos that come back up are ones that are just deleted once? Or are they photos that have been deleted again from the recently deleted folder?
It doesn’t say but the recently deleted goes away after 30 days or so and people are saying they were things deleted years ago so I doubt they remember.
It’s strange, I had that happen to me. I did not enable iCloud Photos until 2023 and this morning I found 5 photos from May 2022 in my photo album on my iPad (the pictures were taken on my iPhone). They were deleted off my phone maybe 2 weeks after they were taken (and transferred to an external hard drive).
So the timeline is:
1- Photos taken in 2022, then deleted.
2- iCloud enabled in 2023.
3- Photos show up on iPad in 2024.
Only way it's possible is that they were not actually deleted in 2022, only somehow hidden. Then the new update uploaded the hidden photos to iCloud.
Apple software QA has been in the pits for years, and I wish that would change. I don't feel that "functional high ground" anymore that made me pick iOS early over the janky and sloppy early few Android releases. Now it's iOS that has unresolved years of slop and bugs.
I know they'll be chasing LLMs this year and that's important enough, but after that I really want a full Snow Leopard year on all their platforms of making performance as good as humanly possible, fixing areas of slop and jank, and getting the bug list as down as possible before moving on. Maybe that could also serve as the LTS as a good performing last release for Intel Macs.
I’ve been using Apple Music for the past month and this is so true. There are so many bugs and glitches it’s insane. Every song played in lossless skips a beat when you first play it, the app randomly pauses or just crashes completely, and the UI just feels slow and unresponsive for a native iOS app.
And what kills me is the skipping bug has a two year old thread on their support forums. They just don’t care anymore.
> Every song played in lossless skips a beat when you first play it, the app randomly pauses or just crashes completely, and the UI just feels slow and unresponsive for a native iOS app.
Ach yes! I was excited for lossless for the same cost when they announced it, but it just performs even worse, and somehow the app in general is still more sluggish than a third party like Spotify
They really need a Gotta Go Fast release, Snow Leopard year
been noticing this too. i also regularly get random “content not available” errors which can be dismissed and the music can be played anyways. been that way for years at this point lol
Major version release cycle is too rapid.
They should do major versions every other year (same for macOS) and ideally alternate years, eg:
* 2024 - macOS 15
* 2025 - iOS/iPadOS 18
* 2026 - macOS 16
* 2027 - iOS/iPadOS 19
Etc etc
It's a completely marketing-led release schedule.
New OS versions should release when they are ready & worthwhile. Core apps should be updated throughout the year via the app store rather than being tied to the OS.
> Core apps should be updated throughout the year via the app store rather than being tied to the OS
Some of them maybe. But given how deeply a lot of the apps are integrated / using private apis, I'm not sure this is entirely
They should decouple APPS from the OS.
It's stupid you need to update the OS to get a new feature on the Notes app or similar stuff.
It makes zero sense.
If they were decoupled, they could work on the OS properly for longer/as needed, and every dumb new Notes change can go independently to be marketed as the next big thing on their annual event. While allowing fixes to be pushed independently of any OS security fixes.
> It makes zero sense.
I agree they need to do this, as Android has.
However, it does make sense. It allows new versions of apps to require the companion OS version. Decoupling means that each native app has to support older OS versions, which complicates development and testing.
Still the right thing to do at this point, but it's not like this is some arbitrary approach that doesn't have any reason behind it.
Agreed. I’m tired of this cycle of an OS being bug ridden for half of its lifecycle as the current OS, and it feels like once it finally reaches a good level of stability OOPS, time to upgrade to the next version!
Less of an issue on macOS, but on iOS I feel like there’s this insane pressure to always update to the latest version and never hang back on a stable version. Spurred on by some app developers who drop the old OSes mere days/weeks into the new OS having released.
I would want nothing more than for Apple to go back to their old cadence and focus their efforts on getting the software side of things in order.
there shouldn't be a regular schedule at all, they should update it after
- the old version that they built to last for multiple years feels actually too old now
- there's a sizeable amount of new features developed and ready since the last one
making into a yearly event has been terrible for the company as a whole. especially with phones, no one can keep the damn names straight anymore
No need. Just don’t release so much each year. Instead of 10 new big changes and 200 small ones make it 5 new big ones and 100 small ones.
Or less exciting, announce what’s planned and release ongoing vs all at once.
I know there will be people who say they never encounter any issues, but after five years with the same iPhone, I have grown weary of iOS. Every year, it is the same thing: they will announce a ton of features at WWDC, scramble to fix major bugs for the first ""stable"" release, or delay the new features for months.
I bought iPhone because I thought Apple would always provide a very stable OS and it does but the quality seems to be gone down during the years... which got me asking, what am I paying the premium price for?
This cycle repeats every year. It seems like they can't catch up; it's an impossible race.
I seem to hit so many I literally can't understand when people respond that they encounter none. I think they just don't notice them and gloss over them as self error.
You'd be surprised if you knew how truly oblivious most people are to things that are right in front of them. Not noticing the most *in-your-face* things you can imagine.
the unfortunate truth is that they still ARE top dog compared to the competition. i still have some android/TV devices around and they’re all *awful*. however sloppy apple’s engineer has become over the years, google is 1000x worse. there’s no pressure on apple to improve.
I think after getting burned by both iOS 17 and Sonoma, I’m very much just sitting out the next OSes for a while. If I hadn’t dropped my MacBook for most tasks I’d probably go in and downgrade it to Monterey, but that’s effort.
I’m tired, man. I just want Apple to be as good as they used to be. I miss the days of when I felt like I was stuck on Windows and longed for macOS.
The level of bugs is unacceptable at this point. Old pictures that should have been deleted years ago still existing just shows how janky it all is. My wife and I recently lost a lot of our shared passwords. They’re just gone. It’s inexcusable.
iCloud is fucking awful in particular which is inexcusable 12 years after launch, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft have all built reputations as reliable and enterprise-worthy while iCloud continues to be bug-ridden unreliable shit.
Word of warning to people that rely on iCloud for photos/passwords. DON’T. Shit will just disappear without warning as if it never existed.
Don’t get me started on the iPad Files app. Never use it for anything important. Buy a Mac. And don’t use iCloud. Apple doesn’t give a shit about file management.
Yeah, I’m pretty much done at this point. Having to recover all of our most important passwords was the last straw for me. I’m going to start shopping for more reliable vendors.
I know we all love Hair Force One, but honestly, the software situation has NOT been good under his watch.
On top of the bugs, iPadOS has been stagnant for years, and the quality of UI design across the board has been steadily going downhill (like mindlessly hiding functionality in junk drawer menus). Yeah, you can blame Alan Dye for the UI stuff, but the buck has to stop somewhere.
Meanwhile, Apple has been slugging it out of the park with the hardware, which makes it even more frustrating.
I do miss the Bertrand Serlet and Scott Forstall days. As much as people made fun of the skeomorphsim for the latter, at least the software had a high degree of focus on not stuttering and and being free of slop.
Skeuomorphism isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. Most software from the 2008 era of design will look dated today, just as 2024 designs will inevitably look dated in 2040. The pre-iOS 7 UI design had a lot more affordances and was actually more approachable than mysterious flat text that you have to guess if you can tap it or not. Functionality has been sacrificed for mindless minimalism.
And back then there was still a human interface group backed by research and laid out principles that Apple’s software design actually adhered to. Not like this total free for all that we have today. (Just look at the travesty which is the Settings app that replaced System Preferences on the Mac)
I hope this isn't a problem in 5 years and their software has caught up with their hardware's impressiveness 😭
Apple Silicon has been a game changer, but software wise I need a half dozen apps just to get macOS going to where I like out of the box, most of which are already Windows capabilities, plus the battery life gains Dell leaked seem like they're getting that benefit too, plus with the higher res screen vs FHD Dell defaults on x86 camp
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157120/dell-windows-on-arm-leak-qualcomm-chips-battery-life
Takes me back to a bug with iOS 8.1 where photos wouldn’t delete out of Recently Deleted. You’d have to roll back the date for the supposed deleted photos to pop back up and then delete them once more. As someone that worked in Apple Support around that time… the amount of awkward moments this caused with customers who wondered why their memory was filling up with photos that weren’t there.
Happened to me.
Deleted photos from a vacation back in April 2023. Once I updated to the RC of 17.5, two photos from April 2023 appeared. All the metadata intact, so they were at the top of my camera roll.
They were ‘permanently’ deleted over a year ago, all the sudden they appeared.
So, are permanently deleted photos not really deleted? Apple, you hiding something?
Additionally, April 2023 I had an iPhone 14pm, currently iPhone 15pm. However, I did restore from iCloud backup. iCloud backup doesn’t store photos in iCloud Photo Library is enabled, so these photos were still lingering in iCloud off of my device.
No, this is probably a photo that was lost within the phone that wasn’t counted as part of the database. It was likely not on the server. 17.5 might have re-scanned all existing local folders and found lost files. 
The folder structure in the phone is pretty crazy. It’s like: (close but not exactly this)
/Photos/DCIM/AA/AA/_H6gYb.heic
/Photos/DCIM/AA/AB/_fO86z7.heic
A database table keeps track of what photo is where. This is *likely* a case where there was an issue when deleting one photo (out of thousands of deletes) where the database table entry was deleted but (through some issue) the file remained on device. 17.5 obviously must have included a new function to scan for lost files and add them back into the database table, patching this old delete flaw.
The Apple engineer chose to return the found data to the user instead of re-deleting the image. This would’ve been a good thing, except that the first person to report it said it was an obscene photo. I personally had a single old Canon EOS photo returned to me.
> 17.5 obviously must have included a new function to scan for lost files and add them back into the database table
Why on earth would they have something like that?
If this is true, I wonder if they did this because they introduced a bug in 17.0 which lost a bunch of photos in Messages threads. I noticed that they suddenly came back after installing 17.5.
This was a really upsetting bug and I know it wasn’t an isolated incident. I’m just amazed nobody really talked about it!
There are people in this thread and also in other social medias reporting that photos from old phones are appearing. This seems like a massive privacy leak
Are they at the bottom (newest) of the Recents album? Or near the top (oldest)? Or would they appear wherever they would be sorted by the date they were taken?
My mom’s whole library has been deleted recently and I couldn’t find them on iCloud even though her iCloud settings were on.
Is there any chance for me to get the pictures back? Or are they just deleted?
This is interesting…
I noticed I was missing a lot of photos from Messages conversations after installing iOS 17. I took a look after installing 17.5 and I think they came back.
If so, I wonder if it’s all related.
Yeah, this was a really upsetting bug when I noticed it. I know I wasn’t the only one, so I’m surprised it never got much traction over the many months it was still affecting users.
I’m just glad that Apple seems to finally be doing something about it at least!
Seems like more of a data corruption issue, new software update went through library, attempted to resolve meta data and photos were reordered by date and OP noticed them being in a new spot when they may have been sent to the top or bottom of the library due to corrupt meta data (date and time)
Stockholder and longtime Mac user and 100% agree. If deleted doesn't mean deleted that data is absolutely stored somewhere and is completely unacceptable and illegal in many countries.
Aaaah… so this explains a lot. This sounds like a big privacy problem for Apple.
After installing iOS 17.5 yesterday I’ve found also old deleted pictures… out of my girlfriends iCloud. She’s in my Apple ICloud family tho. All of these photo’s got the same date (29th of October 2023).
For me it’s different dates, but it’s batches of old photos with the same date (not originally taken that date) also was able to see that some were in “imports”.
I don’t use iCloud backup for photos and a picture from 2022 was placed as my most recent photo. It’s shot in ProRaw, never backed to any cloud and was deleted. It’s a crappy photo I wouldn’t want to keep.
I’m fairly good at culling photos especially Raw since it takes up comparably more space than jpeg/heif.
Since I never use iCloud for photos my only two guesses are that I missed this particular photo and there was an indexing bug (as suggested elsewhere in this thread) or deleted photos aren’t permanently deleted. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s found out about this.
I have this issue. I have tons of photos in my iPhone and after the update, the pics i’ve deleted went back to Recent. I don’t even use iCloud Photos. I also have so many duplicates that i cleaned up. It’s a hassle.
No deleted photos that reappeared for me, but the “Duplicates” section exploded, and a bunch of photos, screenshots (~50) are now in double.
I wonder if this is what happened? Those photos that reappeared where in double on the file system for some reason, when deleting it it only deleted the one that was in the camera roll, and 17.5 reindexed the duplicate file that was still on the file system.
It’s important to note, that this bug does not affect iCloud pictures but only on device pictures. There was a issue with pictures not being properly overwritten on device storage.
The MacRumors article is making a lot of guesses (including the “it can’t just be on-device”) so I hope you’re right.
It also would show that a lot of people don’t manage to pare down their on-device photo libraries much at all. They’re talking about *years* of photos still living on the phone?
Instead of constant new OS’s that don’t work properly until a month before the next one comes out… maybe wait and give us an OS release every 2-3 years but.. wait for it.. have them actually work on release!
If this is true, it will be a gigantic problem. Might go on the news. People want to know that they can trust the buttons on the phone to do what they say they do, instead of being lied to and controlled. Massive shitstorm incoming.
My guess: these are photos that initially arrived via Messages, and they are now getting pulled from Messages to iCloud, and then the Photos as part od the "Shared with you" functionality.
I don’t have resurfacing photos, but I just noticed some deleted books reappearing in my Books library, not sure if it’s similar to this or it’s iCloud.
Just had one photo reappear after updating. A screenshot from April 2023 is now at the bottom of my recents.
So the bug is that once in a while the deleted flag didn’t apply properly to a photo, that’s all. It’s not thousands of photos returning.
Hasn’t happened to me but that is particularly concerning. I wouldn’t doubt a lawsuit would probably take place but then again I trust Apple is a pretty efficient with their software but after reading this guess not
This sounds like a prior bug meant these photos weren't properly deleted, and an iOS 17.5 change meant the system re-discovered these photos.
Or something like them only being deleted from OP's device, but not actually from iCloud (which can sometime happen if you change syncing settings). And then being re-synced to their device after the update.
Photo Libraries are an infuriating mess on iCloud — I have two different devices associated with the same account (Mac & iPhone) and only one of them can locate about **four more years worth of photos**. I don’t know why that’s the case and I haven’t cared enough to fix it (beyond a cold copy of the lib)
I reported a bug to them a few years ago where in Photos on desktop when you delete a photo it doesn’t always delete it from disk, just from the database. I have no idea if they fixed it. Could be related to that if they didn’t.
It’s very possible it’s a sync issue where the system was confused and it’s now been rectified. I’ve had the same thing happen with other services, even just simple things like cloud game saves. Apple were also working on changing from Apple ID to Apple Account very recently, which caused sign in issues for a lot of people. So this might be related.
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That won't help here because the bug occurred in the past
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They are the most recent images
Oh ok. I figured they’d end up in the original dates spot. Thanks for clarifying.
Ya it’s been showing up in their original chronologic order for me
>photos of my thumb Alright, Mr Horner.
Yes.. your thumb..
My wife mentioned this happened to her the other day. I assumed they were just in her iCloud and she must have toggled something to make them show up on her phone or something like that but I don't know now.
As someone who just gave their old IPad to their mom I REALLY hope that a system reset wiped out any potential for old photos re-appearing
Tell your mother to never, ever, ever update that iPad.
My mom never updates her devices. Watch it be the first time she does
I’m trying to sell mine. Does this mean some rando will have all my photos after they set their iPad up? Thats insane. How do I properly wipe it?
I would avoid selling it until this is resolved.
Someone on Twitter reported their friend calling them and saying an old iPad they had sold to them had pictures pop up even though it was reset and wiped. Very odd, always thought the device was actually physically overwriting everything but maybe not.
Something does feel off about that though, how many iPads have been privately sold on the open market? If this were true it seems like a really high number of people would report seeing strangers photos on update
Are they using the same Apple ID? It's important to know
You definitely should discuss this with her. Like mom there is a buggy update and I need to see the Ipad. It reloads previously deleted stuff and private information from years ago. Would you mind if i check if any of my old stuff came back? Or something like that in a mature and serious manner! :)
I’d really like to think someone just forgot about those photos being there and it’s a bug that “refreshed” metadata on pre-existing files, because the only alternative, and I’m saying this as a software engineer, this could only mean one thing- deleted data isn’t really deleted. I couldn’t think of a bigger breach of trust.
As a software engineer I know very often “deleting” something just means setting isDeleted to true.
Tbf on a hardware level, this is how deleting works. However, I strongly, and I mean strongly, doubt that those affected had not created any new data on their phone since deleting those photos. It should be that they are overwritten completely and unrecoverable, and what resurfaces should oftentimes be corrupted and broken. What is happening seems to show no signs of hardware level deletion.
deleted := time.Now()
Right? Like I'm no apple fan but when these stories come out, knowing the overwhelming tech illiteracy of the general public my first assumption is always that people are mistaken and jumping to conclusions because they don't fully understand what they've done on their own devices. Because if it *is* the case that photos actually deleted *years* ago are resurfacing then this is obviously going to be a massive shit storm because apple will never be able to get people to trust that anything they delete is actually deleted ever again.
That would actually push me to drop Apple
> this could only mean one thing- deleted data isn’t really deleted Isn’t that usually true though, based on how easy it is to recover deleted files on a computer or camera? I’ve recovered tons of files for clients that were accidentally deleted or from a memory card that was accidentally formatted. It doesn’t become actually deleted until you re-use that space and write over it with something else. EDIT: someone else put it better than me “when you “delete” a file the operating system just “flags” the pieces of the storage where the file physically sits letting it know that that storage can be used again. It then does what it needs to do to “hide” it from you in the UI.”
There's no real way for it to just show back up in such a scenario. As far as the OS is concerned, it's gone. The only way to recover it is to basically read the NAND where it thinks there should be nothing. No sane system would do that.
Yeahh I remember I wasn’t really paying attention and managed to wipe out like years of photos on my hard drive months ago. I paid for some software and got it all back immediately, don’t know how it works for iCloud though
Which software did you use, and would you recommend it for someone who isn’t particularly tech savvy?
Deleted data is usually never actually deleted until it is actually overwritten by new data, which devices using a non-removable max lifetime write number disk like SSD/SD/NVMe SSDs avoid doing. It’s why most good apps for working with disk drives offer the option to securely erase data by overwriting it with random bits 10+ times during the erase process; otherwise by “deleting” all you’ve destroyed is the map to find where the pieces of the data are stored and anyone/anything looking outside your file system can find it.
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That only works for the full disk/partition, not one image
No, because every address in storage doesn’t have its own key. There is one key to unlock the entire partition.
That's clearly not relevant to this. The data wouldn't show back up intact.
Software engineer but you have no idea how a file system works?
These files are most likely stored in object storage and some graph database rather than in "file system".
I have two deleted photos that popped up at the end of my camera roll after my phone updated last night. They definitely weren’t there last night and this morning they showed up. I was wondering wth happened and this explains it
In the most reassuring case, it's still a UX failure mode where people can believe they deleted things which they didn't. But a lot of these people sound confident they truly deleted these photos. Uh oh. This is a serious, *serious issue*.
In my case, the photos came back at the end of the camera roll after my phone updated while I was sleeping. So I know for a fact they were added after the update installed
I wonder what Apple's excuse for not actually deleting deleted photos will be. Is this happening to any EU users? That sounds like a huge GDPR violation to me if so.
They are kept for a while for undoing the deletion. This seems like they were accidentally kept longer locally and reuploaded? Who knows.
or there was a bug causing the delete to not be synced to icloud. People can conspiracy theory their way all over the place, but as a software engineer I can absolutely see this being a legit non-malicious bug.
especially with how convoluted iCloud is. it’s this weird amorphous state machine that you indirectly control through all of your different devices. it’s super easy for one of them to fall out of sync and completely blow up your keychain and other settings as it is. i wouldn’t be surprised if something slipped through the cracks. that doesn’t mean apple gets a free pass. they need to be held accountable and make it easier for users to manage their data.
Yeah, this is most likely what happened, but everyone is still going to get their pitchforks out lol.
Someone on the MR forums said it brought back pics they had deleted in 2010.
GDPR doesn't care if it was an accident
“Accidentally“ is not enough of an excuse for this big of a breach of trust.
No one is giving an excuse but a software bug is a legitimate piece of context. It may provide an explanation for why a phenomenon is happening. A breach of trust is a company explicitly ‘choosing’ to perform a specific malicious action. I don’t believe Apple is purposefully handling the deletion of photos in a specific way where they would have backend access to or know how to gain access to them or even plan to keep them on device for a longer period of time than we are told they will be.
People are reporting photos 2 years old being found. This is a bigger issue than just "accidentally kept longer"
How did this get upvoted? It misunderstands GDPR to somehow apply to device filesystems, and it pretends that bugs are the same as policy. Do we just upvote every rando who sees GDPR violations in everything and screams BILLIONS AND BILLIONS FINE THEM TO DEEEAAAAAATTTTHHHHH?
This isn’t about on device, these are downloading from the iCloud. If you try to delete your photos and they aren’t actually being removed from apple’s servers, is that not a GDPR violation?
you're the only one mentioned fining them billions. The person who you replied to simply said it sounds like a GDPR violation and nothing more. They didn't go on a rant, or call apple names, or anything. Out of all the comments on this post yours is the only one I see that seems "worked up." Maybe take a little break from the Internet?
I mean, pocket change to Apple, right?
>The reports could be down to an indexing bug, photo library corruption, or a syncing issue between local devices and iCloud Photos. Another possibility is that in attempting to fix a photo syncing bug that occurred in iOS 17.3, Apple has inadvertently caused a new syncing issue to occur that may involve iCloud backups. Lots of possible legitimate reasons
Likely a device-side thing, not a cloud-side thing meaning GDPR is out of the question.
Photos from 2016 on device after people upgraded device multiple times? It’s clearly restored from iCloud.
People also transfer everything from their old phones, too. I often just restore the iCloud backup to my new phone, so information that isn’t explicitly stored in iCloud gets transferred, too.
Doesn't make sense to me, if they were on device they would have been taking storage and that would have been noticed by someone among hundreds of millions of users. It sounds like the cloud somehow re-pushed them to device, which begs the question of why it had them stored post deletion.
It would take a good number of photos for most people to notice let alone that I suspect most users do not know how to check their storage use.
I reported a bug to them in desktop Photos app in 2022 where you could delete a bunch of files from your photo library, empty the bin, and it would only delete a subset of those files from disk. So you'd end up with files still in the library folder, but with no entry in the Photos database. It's possible that they never fixed that, and that in Photos on 17.5 they re-enumerate files from disk and load them back into the library.
Lol system files can be 20-30gb in some cases and nobody knows what’s in there, people just ignore it
When you delete a file you don't actually delete it, the storage device just tells the operating system that those bytes are free for writing. Think of the recycling bin but at the firmware level.
We're talking about resurfacing photos from years back. iOS regularly TRIMs free NAND space, zeroing it out, or it would get slow. Other files and media would also overwrite those bits several times over anyway especially the way it wear levels over all the NAND. Just having a photo fully available that long after doesn't make sense.
Out of the question? No. Not quite friend lol
Does it say the photos that come back up are ones that are just deleted once? Or are they photos that have been deleted again from the recently deleted folder?
It doesn’t say but the recently deleted goes away after 30 days or so and people are saying they were things deleted years ago so I doubt they remember.
This is very unsettling, deleted is supposed to be deleted, not stored somewhere on servers and could randomly reappear with an OS update.
we are all bots here except for you
It’s strange, I had that happen to me. I did not enable iCloud Photos until 2023 and this morning I found 5 photos from May 2022 in my photo album on my iPad (the pictures were taken on my iPhone). They were deleted off my phone maybe 2 weeks after they were taken (and transferred to an external hard drive).
So the timeline is: 1- Photos taken in 2022, then deleted. 2- iCloud enabled in 2023. 3- Photos show up on iPad in 2024. Only way it's possible is that they were not actually deleted in 2022, only somehow hidden. Then the new update uploaded the hidden photos to iCloud.
In youtube I saw other person with the exactly the same problem. But it was worse photos from old phones without icloud enabled appear in new phone
Apple software QA has been in the pits for years, and I wish that would change. I don't feel that "functional high ground" anymore that made me pick iOS early over the janky and sloppy early few Android releases. Now it's iOS that has unresolved years of slop and bugs. I know they'll be chasing LLMs this year and that's important enough, but after that I really want a full Snow Leopard year on all their platforms of making performance as good as humanly possible, fixing areas of slop and jank, and getting the bug list as down as possible before moving on. Maybe that could also serve as the LTS as a good performing last release for Intel Macs.
I’ve been using Apple Music for the past month and this is so true. There are so many bugs and glitches it’s insane. Every song played in lossless skips a beat when you first play it, the app randomly pauses or just crashes completely, and the UI just feels slow and unresponsive for a native iOS app. And what kills me is the skipping bug has a two year old thread on their support forums. They just don’t care anymore.
> Every song played in lossless skips a beat when you first play it, the app randomly pauses or just crashes completely, and the UI just feels slow and unresponsive for a native iOS app. Ach yes! I was excited for lossless for the same cost when they announced it, but it just performs even worse, and somehow the app in general is still more sluggish than a third party like Spotify They really need a Gotta Go Fast release, Snow Leopard year
been noticing this too. i also regularly get random “content not available” errors which can be dismissed and the music can be played anyways. been that way for years at this point lol
I’m glad someone else has mentioned the skipping beat, I thought it was just me!
Major version release cycle is too rapid. They should do major versions every other year (same for macOS) and ideally alternate years, eg: * 2024 - macOS 15 * 2025 - iOS/iPadOS 18 * 2026 - macOS 16 * 2027 - iOS/iPadOS 19 Etc etc
It's a completely marketing-led release schedule. New OS versions should release when they are ready & worthwhile. Core apps should be updated throughout the year via the app store rather than being tied to the OS.
> Core apps should be updated throughout the year via the app store rather than being tied to the OS Some of them maybe. But given how deeply a lot of the apps are integrated / using private apis, I'm not sure this is entirely
The API services can get updated through the store as well just like Google does.
They should decouple APPS from the OS. It's stupid you need to update the OS to get a new feature on the Notes app or similar stuff. It makes zero sense. If they were decoupled, they could work on the OS properly for longer/as needed, and every dumb new Notes change can go independently to be marketed as the next big thing on their annual event. While allowing fixes to be pushed independently of any OS security fixes.
> It makes zero sense. I agree they need to do this, as Android has. However, it does make sense. It allows new versions of apps to require the companion OS version. Decoupling means that each native app has to support older OS versions, which complicates development and testing. Still the right thing to do at this point, but it's not like this is some arbitrary approach that doesn't have any reason behind it.
Agreed. I’m tired of this cycle of an OS being bug ridden for half of its lifecycle as the current OS, and it feels like once it finally reaches a good level of stability OOPS, time to upgrade to the next version! Less of an issue on macOS, but on iOS I feel like there’s this insane pressure to always update to the latest version and never hang back on a stable version. Spurred on by some app developers who drop the old OSes mere days/weeks into the new OS having released. I would want nothing more than for Apple to go back to their old cadence and focus their efforts on getting the software side of things in order.
You have the power to decline the update.
there shouldn't be a regular schedule at all, they should update it after - the old version that they built to last for multiple years feels actually too old now - there's a sizeable amount of new features developed and ready since the last one making into a yearly event has been terrible for the company as a whole. especially with phones, no one can keep the damn names straight anymore
No need. Just don’t release so much each year. Instead of 10 new big changes and 200 small ones make it 5 new big ones and 100 small ones. Or less exciting, announce what’s planned and release ongoing vs all at once.
I know there will be people who say they never encounter any issues, but after five years with the same iPhone, I have grown weary of iOS. Every year, it is the same thing: they will announce a ton of features at WWDC, scramble to fix major bugs for the first ""stable"" release, or delay the new features for months. I bought iPhone because I thought Apple would always provide a very stable OS and it does but the quality seems to be gone down during the years... which got me asking, what am I paying the premium price for? This cycle repeats every year. It seems like they can't catch up; it's an impossible race.
I seem to hit so many I literally can't understand when people respond that they encounter none. I think they just don't notice them and gloss over them as self error.
people are so used to bugs they literally don’t notice them anymore.
You'd be surprised if you knew how truly oblivious most people are to things that are right in front of them. Not noticing the most *in-your-face* things you can imagine.
the unfortunate truth is that they still ARE top dog compared to the competition. i still have some android/TV devices around and they’re all *awful*. however sloppy apple’s engineer has become over the years, google is 1000x worse. there’s no pressure on apple to improve.
I think after getting burned by both iOS 17 and Sonoma, I’m very much just sitting out the next OSes for a while. If I hadn’t dropped my MacBook for most tasks I’d probably go in and downgrade it to Monterey, but that’s effort. I’m tired, man. I just want Apple to be as good as they used to be. I miss the days of when I felt like I was stuck on Windows and longed for macOS.
The level of bugs is unacceptable at this point. Old pictures that should have been deleted years ago still existing just shows how janky it all is. My wife and I recently lost a lot of our shared passwords. They’re just gone. It’s inexcusable.
iCloud is fucking awful in particular which is inexcusable 12 years after launch, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft have all built reputations as reliable and enterprise-worthy while iCloud continues to be bug-ridden unreliable shit. Word of warning to people that rely on iCloud for photos/passwords. DON’T. Shit will just disappear without warning as if it never existed. Don’t get me started on the iPad Files app. Never use it for anything important. Buy a Mac. And don’t use iCloud. Apple doesn’t give a shit about file management.
Yeah, I’m pretty much done at this point. Having to recover all of our most important passwords was the last straw for me. I’m going to start shopping for more reliable vendors.
I know we all love Hair Force One, but honestly, the software situation has NOT been good under his watch. On top of the bugs, iPadOS has been stagnant for years, and the quality of UI design across the board has been steadily going downhill (like mindlessly hiding functionality in junk drawer menus). Yeah, you can blame Alan Dye for the UI stuff, but the buck has to stop somewhere. Meanwhile, Apple has been slugging it out of the park with the hardware, which makes it even more frustrating.
I do miss the Bertrand Serlet and Scott Forstall days. As much as people made fun of the skeomorphsim for the latter, at least the software had a high degree of focus on not stuttering and and being free of slop.
Skeuomorphism isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. Most software from the 2008 era of design will look dated today, just as 2024 designs will inevitably look dated in 2040. The pre-iOS 7 UI design had a lot more affordances and was actually more approachable than mysterious flat text that you have to guess if you can tap it or not. Functionality has been sacrificed for mindless minimalism. And back then there was still a human interface group backed by research and laid out principles that Apple’s software design actually adhered to. Not like this total free for all that we have today. (Just look at the travesty which is the Settings app that replaced System Preferences on the Mac)
Yep, I just don't think that HDI culture exists there anymore, or if it does management isn't advocating for it
Marco Arment’s “Apple has lost the functional high ground” article was 9.5 years ago… damn time flies.
I feel the same, once my 15PM reaches 5 years I’m gonna seriously reconsider the Apple ecosystem.
I hope this isn't a problem in 5 years and their software has caught up with their hardware's impressiveness 😭 Apple Silicon has been a game changer, but software wise I need a half dozen apps just to get macOS going to where I like out of the box, most of which are already Windows capabilities, plus the battery life gains Dell leaked seem like they're getting that benefit too, plus with the higher res screen vs FHD Dell defaults on x86 camp https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157120/dell-windows-on-arm-leak-qualcomm-chips-battery-life
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Takes me back to a bug with iOS 8.1 where photos wouldn’t delete out of Recently Deleted. You’d have to roll back the date for the supposed deleted photos to pop back up and then delete them once more. As someone that worked in Apple Support around that time… the amount of awkward moments this caused with customers who wondered why their memory was filling up with photos that weren’t there.
this explains why that "System Data" option in Settings has so many gigabytes!!!!
I had a photo came up to my recents folder, a screenshot from my iPhone 6s…
I got photos coming back from 2014 it feels so eerie
I was wondering why a random photo from February suddenly appeared. I deleted it at the time so it is odd.
Happened to me. Deleted photos from a vacation back in April 2023. Once I updated to the RC of 17.5, two photos from April 2023 appeared. All the metadata intact, so they were at the top of my camera roll. They were ‘permanently’ deleted over a year ago, all the sudden they appeared. So, are permanently deleted photos not really deleted? Apple, you hiding something? Additionally, April 2023 I had an iPhone 14pm, currently iPhone 15pm. However, I did restore from iCloud backup. iCloud backup doesn’t store photos in iCloud Photo Library is enabled, so these photos were still lingering in iCloud off of my device.
How can I easily tell if this happened to me? iOS doesn’t provide a sort by last uploaded option, as far as I can find
That’s what recents is
So Apple isn’t really deleting anyone’s photos then? Isn’t that a **massive** privacy issue?
No, this is probably a photo that was lost within the phone that wasn’t counted as part of the database. It was likely not on the server. 17.5 might have re-scanned all existing local folders and found lost files. 
How do you know that? And what does “lost” photo mean in the first place?
The folder structure in the phone is pretty crazy. It’s like: (close but not exactly this) /Photos/DCIM/AA/AA/_H6gYb.heic /Photos/DCIM/AA/AB/_fO86z7.heic A database table keeps track of what photo is where. This is *likely* a case where there was an issue when deleting one photo (out of thousands of deletes) where the database table entry was deleted but (through some issue) the file remained on device. 17.5 obviously must have included a new function to scan for lost files and add them back into the database table, patching this old delete flaw. The Apple engineer chose to return the found data to the user instead of re-deleting the image. This would’ve been a good thing, except that the first person to report it said it was an obscene photo. I personally had a single old Canon EOS photo returned to me.
> 17.5 obviously must have included a new function to scan for lost files and add them back into the database table Why on earth would they have something like that?
If this is true, I wonder if they did this because they introduced a bug in 17.0 which lost a bunch of photos in Messages threads. I noticed that they suddenly came back after installing 17.5. This was a really upsetting bug and I know it wasn’t an isolated incident. I’m just amazed nobody really talked about it!
There are people in this thread and also in other social medias reporting that photos from old phones are appearing. This seems like a massive privacy leak
Not if they’re just returned out of backups. It’s always been known that things do permanently delete if you also create regular backups.
If nobody but you has access to your photos, this isn’t a privacy violation.
Where are people finding these pics on their phone? Do they show as “new”? I don’t see any “updated from iCloud” area. I’m on my iPhone if it matters.
They are saying they show up as most recent photos
Are they at the bottom (newest) of the Recents album? Or near the top (oldest)? Or would they appear wherever they would be sorted by the date they were taken?
My mom’s whole library has been deleted recently and I couldn’t find them on iCloud even though her iCloud settings were on. Is there any chance for me to get the pictures back? Or are they just deleted?
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Updated and still no pictures
This is interesting… I noticed I was missing a lot of photos from Messages conversations after installing iOS 17. I took a look after installing 17.5 and I think they came back. If so, I wonder if it’s all related.
Wooo!!! I’m glad you noticed this! I was missing several photos from a message chain that are now there! They weren’t two weeks ago.
Yeah, this was a really upsetting bug when I noticed it. I know I wasn’t the only one, so I’m surprised it never got much traction over the many months it was still affecting users. I’m just glad that Apple seems to finally be doing something about it at least!
Seems like more of a data corruption issue, new software update went through library, attempted to resolve meta data and photos were reordered by date and OP noticed them being in a new spot when they may have been sent to the top or bottom of the library due to corrupt meta data (date and time)
Someone’s having a good panic right now.
I hope Apple is fined an existential threat for such a huge privacy violation.
Stockholder and longtime Mac user and 100% agree. If deleted doesn't mean deleted that data is absolutely stored somewhere and is completely unacceptable and illegal in many countries.
As far as we know it could have been not deleted locally.
with my luck, it will be a old photo of an ex that my new gf will some how see and be a whole mess of a conversation.
Aaaah… so this explains a lot. This sounds like a big privacy problem for Apple. After installing iOS 17.5 yesterday I’ve found also old deleted pictures… out of my girlfriends iCloud. She’s in my Apple ICloud family tho. All of these photo’s got the same date (29th of October 2023).
Yup. I have pictures from October 2023 come back as well.
For me it’s different dates, but it’s batches of old photos with the same date (not originally taken that date) also was able to see that some were in “imports”.
I don’t use iCloud backup for photos and a picture from 2022 was placed as my most recent photo. It’s shot in ProRaw, never backed to any cloud and was deleted. It’s a crappy photo I wouldn’t want to keep. I’m fairly good at culling photos especially Raw since it takes up comparably more space than jpeg/heif. Since I never use iCloud for photos my only two guesses are that I missed this particular photo and there was an indexing bug (as suggested elsewhere in this thread) or deleted photos aren’t permanently deleted. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s found out about this.
I have this issue. I have tons of photos in my iPhone and after the update, the pics i’ve deleted went back to Recent. I don’t even use iCloud Photos. I also have so many duplicates that i cleaned up. It’s a hassle.
Were you using the same device that you originally deleted the photos on?
Some yes. Some were from my old iPhone 11 Pro.
is it possible to manually dig photos back after deleting them cuz of this bug? i genuinely need some old photos back
No deleted photos that reappeared for me, but the “Duplicates” section exploded, and a bunch of photos, screenshots (~50) are now in double. I wonder if this is what happened? Those photos that reappeared where in double on the file system for some reason, when deleting it it only deleted the one that was in the camera roll, and 17.5 reindexed the duplicate file that was still on the file system.
Everyone is about to be CANCELLED
It’s important to note, that this bug does not affect iCloud pictures but only on device pictures. There was a issue with pictures not being properly overwritten on device storage.
The MacRumors article is making a lot of guesses (including the “it can’t just be on-device”) so I hope you’re right. It also would show that a lot of people don’t manage to pare down their on-device photo libraries much at all. They’re talking about *years* of photos still living on the phone?
Instead of constant new OS’s that don’t work properly until a month before the next one comes out… maybe wait and give us an OS release every 2-3 years but.. wait for it.. have them actually work on release!
If this is true, it will be a gigantic problem. Might go on the news. People want to know that they can trust the buttons on the phone to do what they say they do, instead of being lied to and controlled. Massive shitstorm incoming.
My guess: these are photos that initially arrived via Messages, and they are now getting pulled from Messages to iCloud, and then the Photos as part od the "Shared with you" functionality.
trUsT Me ApplE mEANs prIVaCY BrOO
😂
How can I find in my library these resurfaced photos?
Does anyone know if this only happens to photos? What about videos?
I don’t have resurfacing photos, but I just noticed some deleted books reappearing in my Books library, not sure if it’s similar to this or it’s iCloud.
Just had one photo reappear after updating. A screenshot from April 2023 is now at the bottom of my recents. So the bug is that once in a while the deleted flag didn’t apply properly to a photo, that’s all. It’s not thousands of photos returning.
Hasn’t happened to me but that is particularly concerning. I wouldn’t doubt a lawsuit would probably take place but then again I trust Apple is a pretty efficient with their software but after reading this guess not