Apple explains why deleted photos have been resurrected on many iPhones

Apple has vaguely explained why long-deleted photos have come back to life, much to the embarrassment of some users. The explanation has not convinced many.

In recent weeks, iPhone users have been surprised by some errors that are incomprehensible, when dealing with functions as basic as the mobile alarm or deleting photos. As incredible as it may seem, Photos that many users had deleted have reappeared on their iPhone with the iOS 17.5 update. Now we know why.

When you delete a photo from your phone, you trust that it has really been deleted. Even more so on an iPhone, since Apple always boasts of selling the most private mobile phone. But after updating to iOS 17.5, many users have seen how old photos deleted long ago have reappeared in your album…including nude photos.

We guess how embarrassing it must be if you’re showing someone some photos, and a compromised photo that you deleted a long time ago suddenly appears… What explanation has Apple given?

The mystery of undeleted iPhone photos

For a few days, Apple has remained silent, and has not commented anything about the serious failure. Yesterday it released the iOS 17.5.1 update, which fixes the problem.

It was the perfect time to give an explanation, but the only thing has said the thing is The failure is due to a corrupt database entry in the device’s file systemwhich affects the files on the devices themselves and not those that had been synchronized with iCloud.

Those files may have been carried over from older devices when restoring from a backup or during device-to-device transfer.

Therefore, according to Apple, the failure is due to a corruption in the database that has caused deleted files to have been recovered from old backup copies, always from the mobile phone itself, not in iCloud.

An explanation that has not convinced everyone. The security firm Synacktiv has decided do reverse engineering to the iOS 17.5.1 update code, to see what Apple has changed.

Apparently, iOS 17.5 added a migration routine responsible for scanning and reimporting photos from the file system. The routine was removed by Apple’s recent update because it caused old files to be re-indexed on the local file system and added to photo galleries.

According to this analysis, Synacktiv is not able to explain why deleted photos were in the file system. One possibility is that users had two copies: one in the gallery and another in the files app, and when they deleted them, they only deleted them from one place, and they remained in the other. But the explanation remains confusing.

This incomprehensible error of “resurrection” of deleted photos is not the strangest in recent times. A few weeks ago, many iPhone users arrived late to work, or to class, because their cell phone alarm did not ring.

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