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Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos

macguru212 said:
After the last iOS update (and Mac OS Sonoma) - I'm experiencing quite a few new bugs across the ecosystem.

For the first time in years, I'm a bit too terrified to update anything.

Oh, the humanity of first world problems! :p
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The potential damage that can be done by the 'cloud' is far from trivial so you should trust your sense of trepidation. Years ago, a cataclysmic iCloud Photos syncing bug began emptying all my photos for the lols. I watched on my iPad in terror as it literally erased every photo in existence one-by-one. Only the serendipity of having Power Nap and Optimized Storage disabled on my Mac saved the day. I powered off my router and was able to manually export all my photos for later re-importing before iCloud had a chance to raze my library to the ground. It took a great deal of work on the Mac to eventually recover my photos, but in the meantime iCloud was toast and had annihilated everything. Every. Single. Thing.
 
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dricci said:
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the state of Apple Software QC (or complete lack thereof) in 2024. So much for that "security" paying the premium price and living in a walled garden gets you.
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This is one of the reasons I stopped using the iCloud for photos years back. Bigger question in my mind, if I delete photos or other data in the iCloud and in reality Apple doesn’t delete it but keeps it, what is that saying about Apple when it comes to my privacy?

Something I have mentioned in the past regarding Apple’s silence on what it really does with a users data.

Thought: is this from photo backup or device backup or …? I wonder if any other information is “reappearing”.
 
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Delgibbons said:
Turned it off. Deleted videos still present in recents.

2024>>>>deleted from 2018>>>>>2024

View attachment 2378424
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I'm seeing the same with some of the photos. It appears that it also indexed photos that I shared with others (and not just the other way). When I turned off "Shared With You" it removed the photos that were shared with me, but I believe it kept the photos that I shared with others.

So yea, some sort of bug going on here with how it indexed (and preserved) photos found in Messages history.
 
gphome said:
Thank you for the very informative detailed personal test, the first we've seen on this thread.
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To be clear, I did not set up my phone as new today but I have set up every device as new for the past few years, including my current one, so it would never have known about those old photos. The rest of the post does accurately describe my configuration. I have no old icloud backups of my phones. My backups account storage on icloud is listed as “0kb”.

For example, I have a dozen pictures of a wire (back then the iphone had poor autofocus) that I eventually captured correctly, and I know I deleted those other pictures that were out of focus. This was in 2015.

I also have messages in the cloud off, the pictures were taken with a device, etc. No imessage or messages involvement.

I wonder if this has anything to do with how photo stream worked. Just speculating.

Once more just to repeat: the photos are correctly tagged with the date, so you need to scroll back in your library to find them, they are not showing up in recent for me. It would be good if someone else could replicate this.
 
novagamer said:
You’re right.

Anyway, I did investigate this on my own. It’s bad.

Set up iphone as new / have no old or outdated Apple devices that would have stale photos / have icloud backups off / have data protection enabled. I’m even using lockdown mode on all supported devicies.

I’m seeing old photos I know I deleted appear, some from 5+ years ago. They have the correct timestamp so you have to hunt through your library.

Apple is mishandling our data.

@MacRumors - please quote my anonymously as ‘a user’, I don’t want to be spammed for this.
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MR and other sites need this featured.

Something that should be indefensible is being defended by some, and more eyes to see that this is a real issue and a big issue.
 
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therunningman said:
This tells me that your deleted photos are never really deleted.
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Same for things like Voice Notes. You'll notice Voice Notes on your device take up twice as much storage space as Voice Notes in iCloud. This is because when they created Voice Notes in iCloud, they just duplicated the notes instead of properly syncing them. This bug has persisted for years and Apple still hasn't cared to implement Voice Notes syncing properly
 
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sdf said:
If that’s the only source, they really only need to better indicate where the photo came from. That sounds like best possible case. Wouldn’t that be nice.
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Some of them show the "comment" icon in the corner of the photo. Those are the ones that were shared with me. Some of them don't show anything. I believe those are photos I shared with others. Those are the photos that do not appear to be cleaned up when disabling "Shared With You". So there's definitely some sort of bug there. It's deeper than Apple accidentally toggling "Shared With You" on for everyone.
 
Jim Lahey said:
The potential damage that can be done by the 'cloud' is far from trivial so you should trust your sense of trepidation. Years ago, a cataclysmic iCloud Photos syncing bug began emptying all my photos for the lols. I watched on my iPad in terror as it literally erased every photo in existence one-by-one. Only the serendipity of having Power Nap and Optimized Storage disabled on my Mac saved the day. I powered off my router and was able to manually export all my photos for later re-importing before iCloud had a chance to raze my library to the ground. It took a great deal of work on the Mac to eventually recover my photos, but in the meantime iCloud was toast and had annihilated everything. Every. Single. Thing.
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Yikes, that's nasty. I only sync basic data with iCloud - nothing critical like photos or desktop files.
 
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incidentallycheckout said:
MR and other sites need this featured.

Something that should be indefensible is being defended by some, and more eyes to see that this is a real issue and a big issue.
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At least one or two other people should see if they can replicate my experience. I think the photo library “recents” being a problem (probably due to less data protection or something) is making people overlook the bigger issue. I would strongly suggest no news sites post this until a second person verifies, please see my most recent post above.

But in principle, yes you’re right. This is a major, major deal assuming I’m not hallucinating. The biggest tell for me is I have a lot of groups of blurry photos I would have shot and deleted. It’s hard to remember whether individual ones were deleted or not, but that wire example I gave is something that annoyed me being in my library and I explicitly remember going in and removing it. But memory is fallible so I’d like a second or third independent verification.

People’s concerns and snarky comments obviously have a place in open discussion but we need someone else to go through what I did here to validate. If it’s real, it’s probably going to be the biggest news story about Apple this year.
 
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I can’t even with this. I don’t think Apple is beyond saving, but they definitely seem to be in decline lately.

Can’t wait for the context aware Siri AI update:

“That looks kinda small, would you like for me to enhance it?”

“Dammit Siri, I deleted these pictures!”
 
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There's enough smoke here to make me scared of fire. I haven't updated yet, and have turned off all the auto updates until this gets sorted. This is a nontrivial bug, and should not have shipped.
 
incidentallycheckout said:
We've had countless examples of people who saw deleted photos return already anyway. Clearly there's a big issue going on regardless of how or why it happened.
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The details matter for data handling reasons. I appreciate your point of view but please read through my posts in full and consider why I’m taking the angle I am. I have every option enabled that should make this impossible as a bug involving icloud backups and merge conflicts.
 
Wonder if that explains why my iCloud was warning me I was reaching my max shortly after I updated my iPad, even though I'd just done a recent 2 GB+ purge...
 
novagamer said:
The details matter for data handling reasons. I appreciate your point of view but please read through my posts in full and consider why I’m taking the angle I am.
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I read your posts in full, please understand I do not care why it happened. I just care that things that were "deleted" weren't actually deleted. It isn't my job to troubleshoot or fix the issue, Apple has high paid staff to do that.
 
L
hardwickj said:
I'm seeing the same with some of the photos. It appears that it also indexed photos that I shared with others (and not just the other way). When I turned off "Shared With You" it removed the photos that were shared with me, but I believe it kept the photos that I shared with others.

So yea, some sort of bug going on here with how it indexed (and preserved) photos found in Messages history.
Click to expand...
I definitely don’t remember sharing these though if that makes sense (they’re pretty hefty video files)….unless I airdropped them to my iPad from the iPhone which is possible!
 
spazzcat said:
It is not a cloud issue.
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Please elaborate, genuinely asking for more information from your point of view because I don’t see this as being anything except data mishandling in the cloud based on my configuration and experience.

From the end-user’s point of view I understand the opinion that “the reasons don’t matter” but I deeply care about the reasons here and although I do not work for Apple I have helped them fix critical issues in the past a couple times.
 
macduke said:
I can’t even with this. I don’t think Apple is beyond saving, but they definitely seem to be in decline lately.

Can’t wait for the context aware Siri AI update:

“That looks kinda small, would you like for me to enhance it?”

“Dammit Siri, I deleted these pictures!”
Click to expand...
Ugh, bugs are not fun but they happen; there is no such thing as bug-free code.
 
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