Apple released iOS 17.5.1 update earlier this week, fixing a potentially embarrassing bug that allowed long-deleted photos to be suddenly recovered. The fix comes as a relief to many, but users who gave it more thought are wondering if the bug in iOS on the iPhone or was it an iCloud issue? What if it was iCloud, what the hell is Apple, why do you keep deleted photos long after the 30 day waiting period? Does Apple secretly keep our photos for nefarious reasons (dun dun duuun! )?
According to reports, iCloud has nothing to do with the bug. 9to5Mac confirmed with Apple that the photos were only stored locally on the device and not synced with iCloud Photos. Instead, these “files could have persisted from one device to another when restoring from a backup, transferring from device to device, or when restoring from a iCloud backup”.
As for a Reddit post claiming that recovered photos appeared on an iPad sold to someone else, Apple told 9to5Mac that this claim was false: This couldn’t happen if the seller had completely erased the iPad via Settings > General > Transfer or reset > Erase all content and settings. This permanently deletes all data from the device and reinstalls the operating system. This Reddit post has since been deleted, so it appears either it was fabricated or the poster was misinformed.
In case you don’t want to take Apple’s word for it, a third-party security researcher confirmed that iCloud Photos was not involved in the bug. SynAcktiv took the iOS 17.5.1 update and, through reverse engineering, discovered that the problem was indeed an issue on the device, and not with iCloud Photos. According to SynAcktiv’s report, “the photos that reappeared were still hanging around on the file system and they had just been found by the migration routine added in iOS 17.5.”
It’s not iCloud Photos, that’s good to know. The question remains: why are these photos still on the device long after they were deleted? Apple won’t go into detail but blamed “database corruption” in the iOS 17.5.1 release notes. Typically, when you delete a file on a computer, the file is not actually erased. The operating system marks areas as available for file storage, so the file remains there until it is overwritten. This might have something to do with the bug.
However, SynAcktiv points to a Reddit post that cites an anonymous Apple source saying the issue involves photos saved in the Files app. SynAcktiv could not confirm this claim but concluded that it was “plausible.” In any case, the problem is fixed with update 17.5.1.
