Just… no. Photos app does everything on device, in full privacy. That’s the whole point of ‘on device’. And the ‘recent scandal’? Please read what actually happened.🧐
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Apple Likely to Add Google Gemini and Other AI Models to iOS 18
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I have read they have updated it to 17.5.1 and issued some kind of explanation where they said it was due to corrupt libraries. And this explanation still sounded shady.
I agree that for most users (especially younger generations, probably) Photos app is good. But I have seen this app since iOS 3 at least and now yeah, it gained so many options but at the same time became so complicated. I wish there was way to make it simple with just “Photos” “Videos” and “Search” tabs, as well as opt-out automatic videos and faces detection
If you don’t add any faces, then it wont try to identify face. Not sure what you mean by automatic videos.
The recent resurfacing of photos issue is not really surprising if you think about how photo deletion works in Photos. When you tell Photos to delete a photo, it moves it out of the main photo index and then moves it into an index of recently deleted photos. This works kind of like the trashcan for deleted files in that you can still see the photos and if you decide to undelete the photo, it can be put back in the main index. While in recently deleted index, no photo files are deleted, they are just hidden in the main part of Photos. Every day a timed process is supposed to check recently deleted index and delete files that have been there for 30 days. It then sends instructions to the operating system to delete the file and the file gets deleted.
In this case, there was a bug that sometimes wrote the wrong data to the recently deleted photos index. The photos were hidden but not available when the automated process looked for photos to delete. The files for those photos just sat there in the folders of the photos library with no links to them in the Photos index. At some point a new update was released that checked for lost photo files. When it found some, it helpfully added them into the Photos index and they were visible again. I have had photos disappear before when a storage device was getting flaky and photos might drop out of the index. Rebuilding the Photos index will restore those files. I haven’t seen that particular problem in a few years but it is possible.
Those photos were never actually deleted, they were hidden and scheduled for deletion but that last step never happened. This was not sketchy, it just points to a weakness in the index database system for Photos that should be investigated and beefed up.
Why do you keep insinuating there are shady scenarios? If you mistrust Apple to this extend then why are you still an Apple user? The explanation for the deleted photos reappearing was correct and repeatable and had nothing to do with Apple being ‘shady’. A bug is not a conspiracy.
You don’t like the Photos app, and that’s fine. I’m fairly neutral about it myself, as I have no clue how to better manage the 200K+ photos I have collected over 3 decades of snapping away.
Android & Windows are 1000x worse. Also no manufacturers offers this kind of quality of materials, build and such. It seems we are now in the middle of nowhere like “Apple vs trash”, there is still no competition to what Apple makes.
Nevertheless I would prefer to be given more options where to store photos – in individual folders or in Photos app. Also it would have been perfect if “Recently deleted” didn’t exist at all, I am so tired of double deleting photos. At least I would like a switch to disable it, I understand there are different people
Automatic videos=“For You” tab and all the stuff. I literally never visit this tab but would kinda preferred the phone not to waste resources on it, but unfortunately there is no switch to turn it off.
Same for “Recently deleted”. Would have preferred iOS to just write it with zeros instead of all this indexing and reindexing. It is just complicated for me as for someone who is ALWAYS 100% sure if I want a photo to disappear or not. On macOS you can delete a file without placing it into trash btw.
I remember how it was in iOS 7 and before. And when they introduced version 8 I was so mad that they added this dumb trashbin. And same for “files” btw. Apple needs to understand that “two mouse clicks” and several finger taps and menus are not the same thing
I’m sure that you are always very careful and methodical with your photos and never make a mistake in deleting one. Unfortunately, the rest of us sometimes realize that we had selected the wrong files or soon after change our minds about deleting a photo. The Recently Deleted list is a simple and helpful insurance policy from a common mistake that many people make.
If you feel the need to immediately delete a photo with no recourse, I’m sorry but you will need to open that list, select the file and hit “delete” one more time in confirmation. Unless you are doing this on a daily basis, it should not be a major imposition. If the photos are not that sensitive then you can wait for the 30-day cool off period when the photos will be deleted unless that bug crops up again.
I find the “For you videos” a pleasant opportunity to revist photos that I have not seen in a while and might otherwise not see again. The small amount of processing time it takes when the phone or Macbook is idle is not a problem.