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And if you read my post instead of just quoting it, you would see I’m agreeing with you. However, the article calls it a bug in 17.5 and comments call it a recent failure of QA.

I am uninterested in spinning this, only in honesty in how the presence of supposedly deleted photo data is handled.

This is not a 17.5 bug.
Exactly I don’t care about a bug that undeletes a photo that was still in recently deleted section. I want to know why it has the ability to bring back a photo deleted last year.
 
Sounds simliar to the bug I mentioned the other day on another post.

Another bug I found in ios 17.5 was if you go into iphone storage and scroll to messages it shows your photos that youve received even if you already deleted them outta your messages app. Photos shouldnt be there when youve deleted them outta your texts and outta your iphone
 
"What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." - Apple. But they forgot - and when you didn't want it to stay on your iPhone it may reappear a year later and be uploaded to iCloud without warning.

Bugs are bugs I guess but with this and any other recent catastrophe you care to mention Apple are fast becoming a bad joke in my estimation.
 
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What do you mean by "overwritten by newer data"?

Let's say I delete 10 files, emptry my Trash and then delete another 10 files and empty the trash. Are they overwritten?
Nope.

Delete your ten files, then write new data that occupies every bit of space that the old files had taken up in exactly the same places. Then it's overwritten. In the old days on spinning platters you could actually arrange for this to happen. With SSDs and their data shuffling and organizing habits I'm not sure this is still possible. And in the cloud you can just forget it.
 
Anyone has this happen with Advanced Data Protection on? I have not seen any old pictures resurface or duplicate, have ADP on. Wonder if it made any difference.

Edit: I also have Cloud backup turned off
 
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Anyone has this happen with Advanced Data Protection on? I have not seen any old pictures resurface or duplicate, have ADP on. Wonder if it made any difference.
Correct, this is also important.

1. Did this occur on anyone’s account with icloud backup turned off (which would mean Apple is mishandling data in icloud photo library and is very bad.)
2. Did this occur on anyone’s account with ADP on, and if so were those photos older than 30 days.

These 2 points are the most important thing because it will paint an extremely revealing picture. It’s a big deal in general, but if there are old backups floating around that the software looked at it could plausibly cause some merge conflict and not wanting to lose data, restore the ones it finds missing.

If either or both 1. and 2. apply, all bets are off here and it needs another, distinct top-headline story and a full investigation.
 
I believe they delete them from the index only. The actual files remain there.
Most likely. Undelete programs were quite the thing in the old days. Deleting a file meant that the index to the file was removed from the directory. With the right routine you could reconstruct the directory entry to file IF you hadn't written anything new to the disk since, and sometimes even if you had.
 
I'm curious to know how the pictures were originally delivered to the users in question. Did they take them with their own phones or perhaps were they sent to them via Messages. If the later, what sort of message retention do they have set (30 days, 1 year, forever)?

Could it be possible that the "Shared With You" option got flipped ON for Photos? (I had turned it off myself but now see it's back ON after the installation of 17.5.)

I only keep messages for 30 days so I don't foresee this as an issue for me, but may be worth checking for others.
This is what I first thought of too.

Is it possible that users deleted them from the Photos app, but the photos was originally sent to them by email, Messages, or another messaging app, and the original message with the photo was still with one of those apps, but long forgotten about. And the bug is not that it's "un-deleting" them, but rather reimporting them from the original source?

Something like that.

I've long felt there is something funny going on about the way photo storage works with Messages when it's set to "Enable Messages in iCloud". I bet it's related to this.

This wouldn't be good either, but far less concerning that actually fully deleted (apparently) photos reappearing, which is very concerning.
 


There are concerning reports on Reddit that Apple's latest iOS 17.5 update has introduced a bug that causes old photos that were deleted – in some cases years ago – to reappear in users' photo libraries.

iOS-17.5-Feature-Orange.jpg

After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. "Same here," said one Redditor. "I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly."

"Same thing happened to me," replied another user. "Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023." More reports have been trickling in overnight. One said: "I had a random photo from a concert taken on my Canon camera reappear in my phone library, and it showed up as if it was added today."

It's not clear what's happening, but given that some of the photos were apparently taken years ago, this cannot be an issue with recently deleted photos being undeleted. In Apple's Photos app, deleted photos and videos are kept in the Recently Deleted album for 30 days, so that users can recover or permanently remove them from all devices.

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. Some users running iOS 17.5 developer beta 4 earlier reported similar experiences. We'll update this article when we learn more.

Article Link: Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos
It just works.
 
Exactly I don’t care about a bug that undeletes a photo that was still in recently deleted section. I want to know why it has the ability to bring back a photo deleted last year.
I’m really curious how this happened. I haven’t looked at the storage of Photos recently, but years ago they were just files in a bundle. There was also a index database. So it’s easy to see how an index century could be removed, but maybe the photo file wasn’t. That would be a serious bug. On the other hand, it’s also possible to copy files into the bundle. I know, because I’ve done that by mistake. That will be user error. Photos should be robust enough to not do the first case and catch the second second.

I doubt that storage system is still used now that we have cloud storage but that suggest maybe the copy algorithm copied and orphaned photos up.

That should never have happened.

But assuming it happened in the past, the only reasonable and honest way to handle it in 2024 is to re-add the photos to the modern equivalent of that index.
 
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Deleted videos from 2018 showing up as recent here too. Very odd. Just recordings of a John Williams orchestral concert I took at the Royal Albert Hall. How the hell have they reappeared though?!
 
It's at times like this I know I made the right call excommunicating iCloud from all personal data storage. No iCloud Photos, no iCloud Drive, no Messages, no Safari, no Notes, no Reminders, no Backups. Almost nothing expect Keychain, Calendars, Mail and whatever other sundries I'm unaware of and can't directly control. Also ADP enabled with no web access. FTW.
 
Tim Cook has overseen the utter and complete devolution of Apple’s overall software offering experience. What used to be a feature is fast becoming the core problem haunting the whole experience.

So many things that used to “just work” don’t work at all anymore, new features and apps are introduced with wholesale non-starter issues, and the bugs, oh the bugs.

We need a real product person that uses these devices for opening more than their daily bean counter reports to be leading Apple again. The whole of the experience has completely fallen apart.

You must be new to Apple. Apple has always had issues within their software at one point or another. Remember the great bricking of iPhones with an update... or the compete erasing of hard drives when you updated the OS. Not making excuses, but this isn't something that is new under Tim Cook. This was also under Steve.

This bug, is a big ole no no though.
 
This is what I first thought of too.

Is it possible that users deleted them from the Photos app, but the photos was originally sent to them by email, Messages, or another messaging app, and the original message with the photo was still with one of those apps, but long forgotten about. And the bug is not that it's "un-deleting" them, but rather reimporting them from the original source?

Something like that.

I've long felt there is something funny going on about the way photo storage works with Messages when it's set to "Enable Messages in iCloud". I bet it's related to this.

This wouldn't be good either, but far less concerning that actually fully deleted (apparently) photos reappearing, which is very concerning.

This is the "issue" that I'm seeing. The photos are not undeleted. They simply flipped on the feature to include photos from your Messages chat history.

It *is* admittedly confusing and is exactly why Apple needs to include a change log of fixes/changes for each release, which they almost never do, or even when they do, is so nondescript that it is effectively worthless.
 
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So you don't use
  • iCloud Mail?
  • Contacts?
  • Calendars?
No to iCloud mail. Calendar with appointments is only on the iPad. As for Contacts, iCloud made such a total mess of my contacts that I decided it's better to put the same entry in three times (iPad, laptop, and desktop linux box) that let Apple's synch abomination screw up again. And I have to enter new data into the linux box by hand anyway.

And photos made a mess as well. In fact the thing it did that pissed me off was similar to what was reported, I wanted to delete pictures from iCloud and keep them on my laptop, but no, iCloud insisted it was going to remove them from the laptop as well and wouldn't take no for an answer. I had to copy the pictures to a thumb drive, delete them from iCloud AND my laptop, then shutdown iCloud forever, then reload the pictures from the thumb drive. Those pictures are probably still in iCloud. There doesn't seem to be a way to delete all iCloud data forever.
 
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