Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos

[novagamer]

Ok, that's great, but you asked for others to help validate this with you, and that's what I'm trying to do.

Can you still go into...
Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> Messages -> Photos
... and let us know how large your Photos stored in Messages is? If it's 0, then that rules out a lot of possibilities. If it's large, then that leaves the door open to a lot of possibilities.

Can you then go into...
Settings -> Messages -> Shared With You
...and toggle it on, then off again, give it a few minutes, and see if any of the photos were removed from your Photos library?

1st one, it’s large but not obscenely, under 1gb. I think it’s accurate and reflects things I’ve gotten since I‘ve had this iPhone.

2nd one, yes I will within a couple hours and report back, see below.

In the meantime I realized I do have a hard, offline backup of an old iPhone from 2019 that held a lot of old data so I’m combing through that to see if I can accurately identify any deltas. The problem is that I didn’t do a good job back then of cleaning up things. I’m nearly positive there are things I’ve cleaned up in the last 5 years but unless I get an actual discrepancy here I don’t think I can say conclusively my anecdotal report is accurate. I’d rather be wrong than claim there’s a massive issue without cause, so I will do the due diligence and investigate. I’ve also edited my earlier post.

Unfortunately my Mac was on standby and updated the damn photo library. If I had it off I would have a VERY easy way of checking this. Sigh.

None of this takes away from what other people are seeing of course but if all of my settings / configurations are having this occur there’s a critical data handling issue vs. a bad bug. Once I identify (or don’t) a delta, I’ll toggle that setting and see if things change.

And yes, to others, as an end user if it’s happening to you you have every right to be annoyed and frustrated and demand a fix.

I will report back on both things. Thanks for the suggestions.

edit: just in case any reporters read my posts, please do not use my anecdotal experience as evidence until I finish this next round of investigation, I do not endorse that and as I said above I would much rather have been wrong about what I remember deleting or have a sync / merge conflict bug (which is bad, but critically different) than have this be a real mishandling of user data.

 

[cableguy84]

Its a feature. Never worry about deleting important photos again… they’ll appear years later

 

[JosephAW]

I feel like Mr. incredible, Can we keep this place clean, for 10 minutes?

 

[Highlander007]

No, I don’t believe I’ve ever installed a windows iCloud sync, and certainly not in the last 5+ years. I don’t even have iCloud web access enabled for security reasons.

All devices connected to icloud are up to date as I have data protection on which required sunsetting anything older.

Do you have an Apple Watch with messages syncing? I have seen in the past where photos that are deleted on the phone stay on the watch...

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

Great. I guess I’m going to have to self host my library again… Unacceptable, even if these get explained away as thumbnail previews.

 

[Big Dave]

You obviously do not remember MobileMe

I still rock an @me.com email addy. Only thing that is cooler is if you rock an @aol.com addy.

 

[sledgehammer89]

I want to have my self-hosted iCloud - without deep AI, but with deep integration into iOS.

 

[klspahr]

I just updated, no deleted photos reappeared. I have advanced data protection turned on. I have deleted many photos in the past.

BTW, I am one of those who is very upset with the current quality of Apple OSs. I see many bugs, I thought about documenting them but no one at Apple seems to care, so why waste more my time? Plus Apple Support is a waste of time too.

Somebody asked if we are so unhappy, why don’t we go to the other guys?

It is simple, although I’m unhappy with the current state of things, the alternative is way, way, way worse. IMO

 

[Jim Lahey]

Don't forget, just because one may not have iCloud Photos enabled doesn't mean there is no possibility of any interaction with prior cloud data persisting in the ether. It's just a UI toggle and we have no way of knowing 100% what may or may not be occurring in the background. Yes it's unlikely but, honestly, I don't trust Apple any further than I could throw a cement mixer so as far as I'm concerned all possibilities are open to speculation irrespective of apparent user-facing settings.

 

[uacd]

Wow. Glad I never turned on iCloud Photos.

The problem is that there are real people (even in this comment thread) who are telling they were never using iCloud Photos either. And they had photos resurfacing. It means that deleted photos are actually never deleted, even if these are local

 

[hardwickj]

1st one, it’s large but not obscenely, under 1gb. I think it’s accurate and reflects things I’ve gotten since I‘ve had this iPhone.

2nd one, yes I will within a couple hours and report back, see below.

In the meantime I realized I do have a hard, offline backup of an old iPhone from 2019 that held a lot of old data so I’m combing through that to see if I can accurately identify any deltas. The problem is that I didn’t do a good job back then of cleaning up things. I’m nearly positive there are things I’ve cleaned up in the last 5 years but unless I get an actual discrepancy here I don’t think I can say conclusively my anecdotal report is accurate. I’d rather be wrong than claim there’s a massive issue without cause, so I will do the due diligence and investigate.

Unfortunately my Mac was on standby and updated the damn photo library. If I had it off I would have a VERY easy way of checking this. Sigh.

None of this takes away from what other people are seeing of course but if all of my settings / configurations are having this occur there’s a critical data handling issue vs. a bad bug. Once I identify (or don’t) a delta, I’ll toggle that setting and see if things change.

And yes, to others, as an end user if it’s happening to you you have every right to be annoyed and frustrated and demand a fix.

I will report back on both things. Thanks for the suggestions.

Ok, so, I strongly suspect that those photos you've witnessed reappear are in fact coming from your Messages history. My Messages history dates back to at least 2015 from what I can tell and contains 80k+ messages, but locally it's only using just over 1gb of space, with the majority of that being Photos.

Whether this is a bug with "Shared With You" or something else, it's important to know if those photos are being restored from...

• a local history (meaning another app)
• from a backup (possible but given the scale that people are experiencing this, seems pretty unlikely at this point)
• from the cloud, despite being deleted for a decade+ in some cases (this is extremely unlikely due to both legal and technical reasons, despite the foaming at the mouth, Salem Witch Trial-esque lunacy of some of the people in the comments here)

Everyone needs to just take a deep breath and think for 2 seconds. If Apple were explicitly maintaining users deleted iCloud photos for perpetuity, that would mean...

• Some members of Apple's lawyers and engineering teams would have to be aware of this.
• Any engineers touching iCloud Photos would have to be taking precautions to not let such photos leak back into the users libraries, etc.
  • Given that Apple can't even keep photos from one persons library accidentally appearing in another persons library, do you really think they'd take this kind of risk?
• Somehow, one of those engineers would never let this information leak to the press, anonymously or otherwise.
• Users cloud storage would be growing unabated, far past the storage limits of their plan.

But instead of thinking, we appear to have a bunch of modern day equivalents of 17th century peasants screaming for Tim Apple Cook to be immediately burned at the stake in the center of Apple Park.

 

[Ghengis LeMond]

Of the billion or so iPhones out there along with people’s propensity to take pictures of dopey things they shouldn’t and later delete them (hopefully) there’s bound to be some strange ‘memories’ colages that pop up for a fair percentage of users. Not to mention the dimwits that use photos as their randomized source for computer and tv screensaver content!

 

[Jim Lahey]

If Apple were explicitly maintaining users deleted iCloud photos for perpetuity, that would mean...

I think the wider concern for some might be that Apple may in fact not be maintaining anything very well at all.

 

[uacd]

I feel like Mr. incredible, Can we keep this place clean, for 10 minutes?

This is how this whole comment section now feels like:

 

[MacMan988]

This tells me that your deleted photos are never really deleted.

We've agreed to settle for less to have better privacy (Apple's innovative "privacy by lack of features" concept).
And now this means all those photos we've deleted were kept somewhere in their could...

 

[RobArtLyn]

I wondered if the rogue programmer did this on purpose to let us know that it was never really deleted? Kind of like an invisible whistleblower. I know, as a programmer, it's R.E.A.D. (Read. Edit. Add. Delete).

It’s CRUD. Create, Read, Update, Delete.

 

[vinegarshots]

This isnt as bad as a couple years ago when OTHER PEOPLE'S PHOTOS randomly showed up in my library (I wasnt the only one, either)...😱🤡

 

[motorazr]

The lack of insight in this article is troubling.

If photos are re-appearing after they were deleted years ago, it is not a new bug. It is, in fact, new fix. If the photo had been actually deleted, it should be gone. If it was not actually deleted and was instead orphaned, it should appear in the library until properly deleted. An orphaned photo not appearing as a serious spec.

An alternative would’ve been to delete the orphan photos, but then you wouldn’t know that they had never been deleted until now.

This is an honest bug fix.

I suggested they may have finally fixed a bug I reported a number of times a few years ago; basically photos deleted didn’t delete if they were imported, saved, downloaded;

I only noticed because of storage discrepancies that would arise importing large GB cards into photos app, then never getting the space back… found the images that were meant to be deleted in a folder visible with third party tools.

This had been going on to date, best I’ve known… I think someone might have finally fixed it and photos found the directory it left things in…

 

[novagamer]

Ok, so, I strongly suspect that those photos you've witnessed reappear are in fact coming from your Messages history. My Messages history dates back to at least 2015 from what I can tell and contains 80k+ messages, but locally it's only using just over 1gb of space, with the majority of that being Photos.

Whether this is a bug with "Shared With You" or something else, it's important to know if those photos are being restored from...

• a local history (meaning another app)
• from a backup (possible but given the scale that people are experiencing this, seems pretty unlikely at this point)
• from the cloud, despite being deleted for a decade+ in some cases (this is extremely unlikely due to both legal and technical reasons, despite the foaming at the mouth, Salem Witch Trial-esque lunacy of some of the people in the comments here)

Everyone needs to just take a deep breath and think for 2 seconds. If Apple were explicitly maintaining users deleted iCloud photos for perpetuity, that would mean...

• Some members of Apple's lawyers and engineering teams would have to be aware of this.
• Any engineers touching iCloud Photos would have to be taking precautions to not let such photos leak back into the users libraries, etc.
  • Given that Apple can't even keep photos from one persons library accidentally appearing in another persons library, do you really think they'd take this kind of risk?
• Somehow, one of those engineers would never let this information leak to the press, anonymously or otherwise.
• Users cloud storage would be growing unabated, far past the storage limits of their plan.

But instead of thinking, we appear to have a bunch of modern day equivalents of 17th century peasants screaming for Tim Apple Cook to be immediately burned at the stake in the center of Apple Park.

100% agree, we should not jump to conclusions without evidence. If something did occur I would very strongly bet it was unintentional, I highly doubt some conspiracy exists here.

I can’t be the only one with a backup like this but since I have it and know what I’m looking for I will continue.

My backup is organized in a disaster fashion so I extracted every photo file and am re-indexing my entire drive so I can search for text, I found one possible discrepancy so far but it may just be incorrectly dated and I can’t 1:1 match filenames since they change with a new setup. This is probably going to take all day but I will post results when I finish.

 

[zorinlynx]

This should be a reminder to everyone to not put anything in the cloud that you want to retain full 100% control of. For example, intimate photos.

If you want to take intimate photos, use a dedicated camera with no cloud features. Keep them on local media, and don't put them or back them up to the cloud.

It's just too risky; once something is in the cloud, it's out of your control and you're just putting your trust in Apple or whatever other cloud company you use that they'll do the right thing.

 

[dampfnudel]

This tells me that your deleted photos are never really deleted.

Yeah, everyone’s embarrassing photos that they thought would never, ever resurface because they “deleted” them years ago could still be lurking somewhere ready to strike at anytime. This is another reminder of that.

 

[dampfnudel]

This should be a reminder to everyone to not put anything in the cloud that you want to retain full 100% control of. For example, intimate photos.

If you want to take intimate photos, use a dedicated camera with no cloud features. Keep them on local media, and don't put them or back them up to the cloud.

It's just too risky; once something is in the cloud, it's out of your control and you're just putting your trust in Apple or whatever other cloud company you use that they'll do the right thing.

In other words, if you want to play it safe, don’t take any “compromising” photos of yourself unless you don’t care if the world has access to those photos.

 

[titanic1912]

I wonder if this has to do with the bug in Sonoma where you go to User > Library > Photos > Libraries > Syndication.photoslibrary and find a bunch of old, deleted photos that are quite large in size? I've been going back and forth with Apple Support for months, and they still haven't done anything. I delete the Syndication.photoslibrary file, only for it to pop back up. If you open the library, it contains a bunch of old, deleted photos. Does anyone know if this issue is related to a bug in Sonoma?

 

[dampfnudel]

Only 30 days... or so we thought.

This is BAD.

Maybe Apple should change days to years.

 

[fumi2014]

Just noticed a picture re-added, A landscape shot that is blurred and badly shot (which is why I would have deleted it). This is ridiculous.

The date on it is September 2019.