After installing the iOS 17.5 or iPadOS 17.5 update, you may find a surprise or two (or three or four…) in your Photos. According to several user reports online, the 17.5 update can restore photos you deleted long after the 30-day restore period has expired.
Which could create an embarrassing situation. A post on Reddit stated that some of the resurrected photos contained “nsfw material”, and another post said: “my photos appeared on my OLD iPad that I gave to a friend.”
A user in the Reddit thread claims to be an Apple QA employee and claims that what is happening is that photos sent via Messages are being saved in the Photo Library and the solution is to delete old messages. However, another user responded that their restored photos had not been sent to anyone. Additionally, some users experiencing this issue use iCloud Photos, while others do not.
As others have pointed out (in the Reddit thread and in other reports), when you delete a file, including a photo, the file is not truly erased. What happens is that the reference to it is gone, but the file is still there until another file is written to it. Although you would think that if a photo was deleted years ago and you regularly take new ones, there would be many possibilities for that old photo to be overwritten.
Apple hasn’t commented on the issue, but you can probably expect an early update to fix it soon. Several users have reported that this issue existed in the 17.5 beta builds, but it is unclear if this is a widespread issue. I installed the iOS 17.5 update after its release on Monday and no old deleted photos came back to haunt me, thank goodness.
