Latest iOS update has brought back some pictures I deleted in 2021
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Same here. I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly.
Is it possible that you also have another app like Google photos that has a backup of these photos and it’s “fixing” your photo library by bringing them back for some reason?
Google Photos may have backup, but it will never put anything in your Photos app. Whatever is in GPhotos stays there, unless you download content from there.
I am primarily an Android phone user. All my phone images were Android and Google. I got an iphone last July. I only use on wifi to facetime and occasionally i use it like one would an ipad, it has no sim or cell connection and always in SOS mode. Over time all my Android images wound up in my iPhone gallery. Not sure what connects them. But IOS is able to grab images from elsewhere probably with my unrealized permission. This could be related to what people are seeing.
just to confirm, how did you find out old pics reappeared?
were these "undeleted" pictures recovered and placed at the bottom of your camera roll, i.e. where the most recent pics are?
guess iOS 17.5 may have made changes to the Photos app that require reindexing the photo library. That's creepy.
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This is where I’m at right now reading this thread.
Apple is good on privacy in comparison to its competitors.
That’s a very important qualification, Apple is unequivocally better on privacy than companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, but they are still a massive publicly traded company which is also legally beholden to American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
It's often not better, but pretend to be better or it bashes the competition over fallacious claims about how more secure and privacy focused they are.
I’ll just leave this here. 1:20
They also care about the environment because they shoot ads in apple park - but are simultaneously suing the refurbishment company for not destroying enough iPhones😆
The only value they stand for is the value of their company
Haha so true
Yes, I find this rightly fucked up and a huge bug and privacy concern. The nerds on here are explaining the "true definition of deletion", but that's not the point. As an end-user, if I delete my photos, I never want them back. That should be it, case closed.
I think we all know files are never deleted, there will always be traces of that file.
First of all, deleted photos reappearing isn't "traces". Second, files can be deleted deleted without issue, especially for a professional provider like Apple
Unless it was stored somewhere else, there shouldn’t even be a trace of a deleted photo on an iPhone after 3 years of use, since the bits would have been overwritten so many times. There’s definitely something weird about this.
I think they have other circumstances where files can be orphaned within their library, i.e., remain as a blob but not in the index. With this update, they became better at quickly detecting orphans.
What do you do with a newly found orphaned photo? Re-insert into the index.
Now the question is why their delete operation doesn't wipe the blob. Maybe deleting removes the entry from the index and creates a secondary task to wipe the blob (putting this all in the main thread would lock the UI). Now you have two threads with pending actions; one recovers the orphan, and the other wipes it completely. If the orphan detection thread gets to the blob before the wipe thread, you get the photo back in the library.
That's my theory, which is only based on symptoms, best code security practises, and the fact that large firms with multiple teams have a higher likelihood of getting caught by these kinds of "race conditions".
iPhones use SSD and FBI, etc have been able to recover alot of information from completely wipped SSDs.
So to be fair, when you “delete” a file the operating system just “flags” the pieces of the storage where the file physically sits letting it know that that storage can be used again. It then does what it needs to do to “hide” it from you in the UI.
Now, when you bring the cloud and syncing into it then things get muddy because then you could have a scenario where any system that did not get the “delete this” message comes back online and sync’s the file again as a new file.
OR Apple performed a restore on some storage and it happened to contain your files. They apparently cannot see your files, only that there is data there so it is possible.
This is just a description of one process at file system level and it's not all that deletion entails. It certainly isn't an excuse for a cloud storage provider to not actually delete user files (if that is what's happening. At this stage it could also be an issue with previously corrupted data being recovered).
That’s a little simplistic in this case because not only is there a file, there’s a reference in a database locally on the phone and in the cloud. This feels like an iCloud sync issue in the server side to me.
Well how long does the “delete this file” action stay “alive”?
My guess is dude turned on a device that hasn’t been turned on in a hot minute and it sync’d the files back up to the cloud.
Yeah that’s possible. I don’t sync I message but on my iPad I delete conversations and sometimes when I get a new message on my phone some oldies appear in the conversation on the iPad
This is nonsense. Photos from several years ago are reappearing. File systems don't re-flag files that have been deleted as they may have been damaged. This is very alarming and is a perfect warning for me to setup my own Nextcloud home server and maybe ditch my iPhone for a Linux model.
Ahh the start of any good corporate bootlicking comment.
What are you talking about. I went on to explain how a file is not really "deleted" but instead marked for deletion and then flagged to hide it from you in the UI. If the file does not get overridden and the flag is somehow cleared (basically the file is restored) then it just needs to unflag the space and unhide it in the UI.
How is that bootlicking?
Apple should not have access to your files. They technically DO however it would be encrypted versions of things that they should not be able to decrypt without your key. Yes, they have the tools to change your account and get in that way but we aren't talking about that here.
I went on to discuss how cloud and syncing is a complicated thing. Let's say you have 4 devices and a file syncs between those 4 and the cloud. That is 5 copies. Now, one of those devices ends up on the shelf for 6 months. You delete the file from the cloud and the other 3 physical devices. How long does the "delete" action for that flagged file stay in those other devices and the cloud? It is reasonable to say that at some point in time whatever the "delete" flag is was cleared for other actions.
If that is the case and then device 4 was powered back on, It could easily, when performing a sync, send the file up and it successfully syncs. This is also how/why some of his messages would come back because icloud does not keep them and then sync later. The devices get new messages from icloud if they are online at the time. However if you have a device that has old remnants of conversations, it can sync back.
I'm sorry that I don't just roll out my jump to conclusions mat and get my finger pointing immediately. I have been in IT for 23 years. Most of the jump to conclusion stuff I have seen literally is just due to a lack of understanding what is really happening when you perform an action/function.
When you delete anything from anywhere it only gets deleted or hidden from your accounts/devices. It's never permanently deleted. Apple a privacy advocate? Apple is a business. A business will market what they need to in order to sell products. I would say Apple markets privacy and they are really good at it.
You don't really have a choice. Everything is watching and listening around us all the time now. TV in every room. Computer in every pocket and car. What are you going to do - give up laptops, phones, game consoles and cars?
So, I reported this issue (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255532906) and Apple fixed it. I don't know who needs to hear this but I'm just going to write this up.
TL;DR - There was an iOS bug that crashed my iPhone as photos/videos were getting uploaded to the cloud. Upon force reboot, those photos/videos were seemingly lost from the library. Apple contacted me to send some logs a couple a months ago. Now the 17.5 update seems to have restored the lost photos.
Long Version:
March 15: I go on a jog around the city and take a bunch of photos and videos. I return back to my apartment and drop my iPhone onto the MagSafe charger which I assume begins the iCloud photos upload.
But, immediately after I did that, I receive an Apple Music notification about a new album release. I tapped it to launch Apple Music to check it out. Suddenly the iPhone "half-freezes". I'm unable to go back home, play music, put iPhone to sleep, bring up the shutdown menu, but I'm able to bring up control center and double tap to activate Apple Pay. There was nothing else I can do so I ended up doing a force reboot (up volume button > down volume button > hold power button). I took a video on my Pixel phone just to document this bug (I posted this on X).
After rebooting, the entire day's worth of photos/videos were gone. I checked the deleted folder and nothing was there. I check my Mac, nothing.
I reported it on Apple's discussion board the next day.
March 21 - I get an e-mail from Apple asking to schedule a phone call. We talked a couple of times and one point they had me install a profile to run some things on my iPhone remotely to grab some logs.
April 19 - I get another e-mail from Apple asking for another phone call. We got on the phone and they asked me if I've ever used the Files app to connect to a server. I told them yes, I've connected to my NAS at home before using the Files app to transfer some files.
It's possible this bug deals with phones that have connected to a server using the Files app previously. 🤷♂️
Anyways, I updated to 17.5 and the photos that were gone are now there sitting in my library.
My current assumption is: if you took photos + videos and/or made any edits (including deleting the photos) and your phone froze before the changes made its way to iCloud, those changes were probably never saved. Instead those photos were hidden from the photo library for some reason and there was no way to access them until now. And this bug probably existed for many years, but it was so rare that Apple couldn't track it down until now.
I love your way of working and processing things. Thank you and do more.
Thanks for posting these details. As a developer, what you describe makes a lot of sense. I've suspected something like this was in play from the first time I read about this issue.
I once deleted some notes by accident. A friend of mine worked through a contractor for Apple so I asked if there was anything he could do. He asked for my Apple ID then about 5 minutes later I got a message saying “check your notes”
Every note I’d ever deleted was back on my phone, including auto saves of half written messages in multiples until it got to the final thing. I don’t think our data is ever truly deleted.
"big data"
How is this not a privacy breach?
Btw there is a Recently Deleted section even on notes. You sure you also deleted it from there?
Companies have backup systems. Maybe they just have a way of rolling back icloud for users who screw up? We don't have the ability to go back versions on our own.
The question here is do employees have the ability to see these files? They do at some level for CSAM reviews, but can some rando do what OP is claiming and actually see the content? That's concerning.
They were gone, they auto delete after 30 days. I think I’d had an iPhone for 10 years at that point…there were a lot of shopping lists
That's scary.
I wonder if the same applies to photos and what else.
I would take a stab and say that anything that's backed up might be the same but obviously can't be sure
Only good thing is possibly retrieving lost photos and notes that are very important.
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From a forensics standpoint, if you know how data is stored on a hard drive you'll understand this, but basically, data is written in sectors, and when you delete something, it just marks that sector as usable. It will continue writing in sequential order until it comes back to that sector or until you factory your phone. Also, the ibackupextractor was a software that pulls everything from stored iTunes backups. I miss those days...
I understand the data storage and sector marking thing. Thank you.
I understood discs, sectors, and frag/defrag. Now with SSDs, they’re more reliable and faster, but I don’t know whether or not fragmentation occurs or matters. I guess we don’t have to think about it.
Fragmentation doesn’t occur but sectors can die. When they die the storage is technically fragmented because it’s missing data in the sequence so it overlooks it and moves on to the next sector throwing off the whole drive. This doesn’t happen often and usually when they’re approaching EOL. They’re faster and last longer and also less prone to failing.
Edit: it doesn’t throw off the whole drive just the area that’s affected when a file is recalled from an unaffected area it still pulls the correct data.
Do you guys have iCloud E2EE enabled? I wonder if the result would be different.
Deleted notes are kept for 30 days before being permanently deleted. They are in the Recently Deleted folder.
Yeah but I’m talking notes from years ago not the recently deleted folder
Speculation: there has been a bug where when you’ve deleted a picture, once removed from recently deleted it’s removed the photo library records and index, but failed to remove the actual media. So you won’t see it anymore, you can’t find it.
But then you do an OS update that forces a re-index; this version of the OS stumbles upon the file during the re-index and has no idea what it was, presumes it was bad library data that’s gone missing and pops it back in the library as a recent addition.
People might find photos that the tool but disappeared from photos app, also, if that’s the case.
When it's code required by agencies to make sure spying can continue, then that's not a "bug".
This is very important: could someone comment on whether or not these photos were reappearing on the same phone on which they were deleted, or if they're reappearing on a different, newer phone bought at a later date?
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When you open the photos that reappeared, was it full quality or low? I'm wondering if this could be due to corrupt Photo Library metadata where the original media got deleted but the thumbnail stored in the library for the app to use didn't.
Also, do you use iCloud Photos and/or iCloud Backup?
Yes…… this needs to be answered. Because this is the key question. It will determine if it was iCloud. Or a memory issue fixed or exploited device side.
I don’t have iCloud Photos. I haven’t updated iOS. However, I did have a bunch of old photos from 2016 appear in my Recents at 1:43am this morning whilst I was sleeping. They were taken on a previous phone not my current one, though my current phone was restored 3 years ago from the previous phone’s iCloud backup. These photos weren’t deleted. I still have the originals in my photo library at the correct date in Recents. These additions are all thumbnail sized with odd looking files names “incoming-AHXKIDJEH-JKSKHRIRJ-DJDKDJDB”. 15 in total. My Apple watch may have been updating its OS at the time but my phone is still on iOS 17.4.1.
I’ve answered this in my comments, but for me, they were deleted on an old device and reappeared on a new device.
If the phone had a passcode and if the phone was wiped, the answer is no, they would not have access to photos. iPhones file systems after iPhone 5s are encrypted.
When you wipe a phone, the private key to that file system is deleted, rendering the file system unreadable. The encryption key is stored on the Secure Enclave, which is an element on the processor that cannot be accessed by the main operating system, which means there is no way to access the key.
This is why you aren’t seeing mass amounts of people’s private photo libraries being leaked. If it was practically possible to do this, you would likely already know about it.
The issue of these photos re-appearing do have some privacy and security concerns, especially for high value threat targets. For the average person, this more means your wife is going to catch your ass out for cheating when they see your phone. But chalk this up to sloppy engineering; there is no conspiracy here.
Same happened here photo from September 2022 just appeared out of nowhere in recents section in photos app , weird
Hard to say, but as a developer I could see Apple fixing some obscure photo library corruption issue, with an unintentional side effect of items that were in limbo being recovered. It also could be that a bug causing deleted items to remain in the library in a hidden state is causing this behavior.
Hope this is what happened, rather than finding out your deleted photos aren’t actually deleted.
However, I had two photos from April 2023 that appeared when I updated. I had a 14pm at that time, 15pm currently, so this is definitely photos still being in iCloud, which is very concerning considering I had deleted them over a year ago.
It’s more likely that when you transferred (if you did) that some data also got transferred to the new phone and this new update has either fixed something which was failing to remove that data, or revealed data that was supposed to be removed but now recovered.
It reminds me of when I’ve done updates to macOS years ago and somehow ended up with a folder somewhere with some sort of recovered files after the update. Like something found some data somewhere that was thought to be lost and recovered it. And I wonder if there was a bug that sometimes, after 30 days, the photos were deleted on iCloud, and something happened with a device and the media was left behind, with no library index pointing to it, and all it took was an OS update to stumble upon the file during the re-index you get after update and it has no idea what it was or why it was there and presumes the library index was bad, and pops it back in to the library as a recent addition.
This would then tally with my observations I’ve seen on macOS years previous.
Yeah. macOS has a Lost & Found folder after updates sometimes.
Yeah, actually this was the case, I explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_update_has_brought_back_some_pictures/l476bo0/
Just out of curiosity, why would photos remain in limbo for years? And surely a lot of on-device storage is being wasted that way, no?
Same here! One pic from June 2023 reappeared on my iPhone photo library. I’m sure, because in April 2024 I’ve transferred all my photos/videos to a computer and afterwards cleaned all photos/videos from the iPhone (including trash bin). I don’t use iCloud Photos.
:(
Opposite situation here. Had a bunch of photos disappear recently (not deleted, they just disappeared). I was told by Apple that iOS update would make them come back. And it did!!!
Same.
Edit: full explanation:
I went on vacation April 2023. After, I deleted the photos from my iPhone 14pm because I uploaded them to my own cloud service. I do not keep photos on my iPhone. I have iCloud Photo Library enabled, which is important to know.
Fast forward to this update, two of those vacation photos appeared at the top of my camera roll, metadata intact. I currently have an iPhone 15pm.
Back to iCloud Photo Library and why it’s important. iCloud backups do not backup photos if iCloud Photo Library is enabled. I traded in my iPhone 14pm to Apple and restored my new iPhone 15pm from an iCloud backup, which does not contain photos because iCloud Photo Library is enabled.
So, this isn’t just an on device thing. Another redditor mentioned an iMessage bug where things reappear. I have my messages set to delete after 30 days. I’ve had it like that since the iPhone X.
Are you using iCloud photos?
Same thing happened to me. Six photos from different times all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023.
Just updated and have 1 photo reappear as my latest. I have never used iCloud Photos or synced anything there ever, as I never trusted iCloud’s lack of E2EE backups (which has changed since with the introduction of Advanced Data Protection). Based in Germany/Spain.
Can almost guarantee that it’s a library corruption issue, due to a bug in some previous iOS version of the Photos app. As most tech people will already know, deleting a file doesn’t delete the underlying data, it just removes whatever index/link exists, so you cannot see it.
Given this photo was an image I saved to my camera roll on whatever iPhone I used in 2021, it has persisted in the Photos library file across my backups/transfers over 3 new iPhones.
I think this bug is a great reminder to let you know that for almost everyone (those who don’t enable Advanced Data Protection), your backups and photos on iCloud are not encrypted. If you really care about privacy, you’re still better off syncing to a computer by cable, protecting that backup with a password, and then using a E2EE computer backup service such as BackBlaze. Of course that brings up complications of storage capacity, and ease-of-use.
the most serious problem in my opinion is that apple doesn't really delete photos from its servers
Oh fuck. This can be bad for me.
Looking at your username I think recovered photos are the least of your problems.
You’re not wrong about that.
Yes me too. Some pictures from a few years ago has come back for me. It’s really is shocking. They are in the recent images actually that’s what is worrying me.
This makes me question Apple. I have a hard time believing that this is an innocent mistake.
I have a small number of photos from 2016 which are suddenly at the end of my Recents. I don’t think these are ones I deleted. It is a weird bug.
Exactly the same for me. And I haven’t updated iOS. They are thumbnails with odd looking file names.
Meanwhile - I have been waiting for Apple to fix my “leaving shared Library” issue for almost 8 months now.
I have had an active support case for 8 months. My iCloud Photos are locked in read only mode and will not sync.
WTF is going on.
Seriously starting too question the direction Apple is going…
This entire thread needs to blow up. This sounds like a SICK BREACH OF PRIVACY AND GDPR. People being able to resurrect old notes and old previously deleted pictures still existing...
I'm pretty concerned now. Apple need to be in deep shit if this is as bad as it sounds. Lawsuit mayhem!
Damn let me go check mine right now. Just got off work.
Sssssamsies
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.
I can totally believe it was a repaired library.
So long for the Apple "Privacy" lol.
Now that’s bad. Hopefully we get to hear more on this
Apple be like: you deleted it wrong
Brought back 3,151 deleted photos for me. No typo…over 3 Thousand photos! All are spread out through entire library going back 15+ years.
wish that happened to me, I was hoping some of my pictures would come back. I’ve deleted a lot to clear space
I wanna see a big law suit filed on the basis of this.
Be happy about some hot memories from years ago, you will never as pretty as you was at that time 🤭
*just kidding*
It may be a problem Apple (maybe) had at that time you deleted it. If you are concerned about privacy, don't. No one saw it even you didn't saw it so there is nothing to fear.
Same thing happened to me
What about for those that never uploaded their pictures on iCloud and don’t have an iCloud backup of the same? Did y’all face the same issue too?
After reading this post, I checked my gallery and same. A lot of photos I deleted in the past reemerged.
I encountered this bug once after installing the iOS 17 beta (I don't remember the specific version). However, I simply removed those photos again, and that was it. Nothing strange has happened since then and till today.
Yep same here. Almost 100 photos came back after I thought they were deleted.
How did you spot them? Did they appear as if they'd just be taken, or hidden inside your photo library in their original place?
I am just curious: are the people who see their pictures back living in Europe or US?
It's clearly forbidden in Europe to keep deleted data so wonder if it's a difference in implementation between the data center
This happened to me last night and I’ve not even updated iOS!!
They are all thumbnails with odd looking “incoming-“ file names. 15 in total. All from July 2016.
Sooo…should I wait to update? 🫤
The real question I’m trying to figure out
I had a weird issue after updating my iPhone to iOS 17.5/MacBook Pro 14.5, iCloud merged my contacts/contact details for some reason. Took a long time to fix my contacts again. What a pain.
I wish. I would like a few back that I had once deleted when mad.
Is it linked to the apple account? Asking because i always buy used phones and wouldn't mind some surprises
I lost some very special photos from our vacation when I force restarted my phone. I didn’t feel iCloud is reliable and stopped using since then. But today I got a notification saying “Early moments with Wife” and I see that all the pictures we lost are there in library. Just can’t express our happiness.
im still on 17.1.2 on my 14 pro max, i was about to update when i saw this, im lucky i saw this. i hope apple get sued, this is unbelievable
It's absolutely shameful that this is deleted.
If this is true, always assume that anything you upload to a cloud service will remain there, even after you personally "delete' it.
I consider this a blessing and curse, depending on how anyone else views it.
shit apple no privacy
Craziest thing here is that you remember the pictures you deleted.
I probably deleted thousands of pictures, crazy to remember a specific one from a decade ago.
Wonder how that is even possible.
I mean first of all not everyone takes thousands of photos let alone deletes them. Let's say you take a hundred photos in a year and then at the end of the year you look through them and decide only 20 of them are worth keeping...
And then all the sudden you have a hundred photos from a year where you deleted 80% of your photos... Again this would be incredibly easy to notice for people that don't take a lot of photos.
Or for people that pay close attention to their photos. Obviously if anyone had any sensitive photos that they were deleting and they very specifically remember delet...
What if you had a picture that revealed proprietary information from your company or something or screenshots and you deleted those...
Would be pretty easy to notice something's wrong. It's weird that you seem to be trying to put the blame on a consumer here
How many nude pictures are you deleting though?
While this seems like not a real breach of trust / privacy, please do not think Apple does not have secret copies of everything you have ever uploaded to iCloud. (and more)
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Wow. This literally might stop me from ever handing my old iPhone down to a family member ever again.
I'm assuming you did a full "Erase & Reset" before giving it away?
Oh wow. So it wasn’t just me!!! I legit was like WTF and thinking maybe “Auto Save Media” was turned on in WhatsApp. Happy to see this post.
I hope your partner doesn’t mind
Same for me. Two old photos reappared in gallery after 17.5 update.
just before coming to this post I saw another same post about old deleted photos coming back to ios 17.5
I also got back some photos from my London trip last year
Same here, suddenly 2 raw images appear in the photo library. After I try to see them in full screen the photos app crashes…
Well for some reason my recents now contain literally my entire library - so I have no clue what might have been added back 😑
wow my lost data that was gone after a reboot when files app and icloud photo sync didnt work anymore got also recovered they are now after the 17.5 Update in my gallery. Before i could only restoring them with the diskdrill tool. Apple did something to the photos app, maybe this huge bug is now fixed. But my iphone photos app is still in "recovering from icloud" mode. something is happening!
They’re magically disappeared for me. Strange ios
I haven’t checked my photos, but I have had deleted messages reappearing. Possibly just a sync issue? It’s kind of strange because I’ll have to manually delete the message thread from all of my devices like Messages in iCloud doesn’t recognize I’ve deleted the thread.
I wonder if anyone experiencing this issue has "Advanced Data Protection" enabled?
I’ve got a ton of duplicates I got rid of!
Same here. Hundreds of deleted pictures, some from 10 years ago, just reappeared. This is absurd.
I have a friend that passed away recently and just the other day I found a few older pics of us in my camera roll. You’re not the only one to experience this
That’s real 😱
Man every time I get my adderall there’s an iOS update. Shit is sus lmao jk…
17.5 has been really poor so far. Contact posters not showing when a contract calls. App store does not show app icon on the app switcher. Really weird to see such a late .5 release with so many bugs.
This is real. I’m seeing photos from 2011 from old text chains I deleted… 4-5 phones ago? Crazy
ok nothing is wrong with my photos but i did notice a very old List i kept on my notes which is from 2021 weird thing is i added that note on my very old 6s from that time and thought it went away with that phone like i had 4 more devices after that 6s and how did that note appear on my current 11
Do they appear as newly added or do I have to go through my massive photo library
this is concerning from a privacy and security side 😬
When you "delete" something it simply allows the portion of the storage to be written over ago. Unless you're using a wiping tool that writes the entire drive in Zero's it's always possible to pull up fragments of deleted information.
they saved to icloud and must have redownloaded
Looks like something similar happened with this person:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/s/zVdbpwr2fF
Is this only happening when using iCloud?
hmm weird just looked at my photos app and saw 15 duplicates and saw a few recent pics but dated ages back and are not even relevant they are just random pics i must of deleted a long long time ago oh dear.
When a file is deleted it's not actually destroyed it's just that the data is marked as deleted, so if it wasn't overwritten by something else (which would be very unlikely and surprising) it could be that it somehow got unmarked as deleted and was unintentionally recovered.
Well, fuck, I ain’t updating my phone until this gets figured out.
chinese icloud and the out chinese icloud are different, I assume
Does it affect Macs as well?
It’s the secret AI project they’re working on. Maybe the AI is messing with us.
Damn, can you post those nudes to verify the story is real?
Are these showing up on the same device used to take the photos, or a different device all together? If it's not the same device, that is very troubling. I've also hear reports of deleted voicemails returning as well. Not cool.
Same here. Old random photos reappeared as if I had taken them today. This is creepy as f
Can you share those pics, so that we can assess severity of the problem?
Did the photos just appear or was something else done after updating?
Do you guys that are reporting having the same thing have iCloud Photos enabled? I have it disabled and never experienced this
Photos from 2015 reappeared in Recent. iCloud Photos are off. But I had it on in the past.
Is it only photos, or is it also videos?
I just updated my phone to 17.5 and synced iCloud photos. Lo & behold a bunch of pictures and videos I deleted years ago have reappeared.
This is extremely serious. When we delete this private stuff it should be gone. The fact this has happened suggests something deeply sinister is going on. I wonder if "security" services have slapped a gag order on Apple and have been spying on all our private stuff.
If it is on the cloud then it is out of your control. The only way to get full privacy is to not use cloud services or better still stay off-grid. Apple may have majorly f'ed up here if they are inadvertently able to show deleted data. Imagine the implication for law enforcement or nation states if they know Apple (and likely other major cloud providers like Google) still retain this ability.
I HAVE AN ANSWER TO THIS.
I wondered what all of these people were seeing when they went back through. Most people delete the photos. But not texts. If you’ve been sent a photo (and also likely videos) in your texts, it now shows up in your photos for you to save. Can we confirm that these photos show up in recents, specifically in the album view? And also, all the photos show someones name at the top when you view them. Screenshots for reference:
Screenshots of “brought back” photos
If the answer to these questions are yes, this seems to be a new feature that allows you to more easily save shared photos.
I have new “photos” but they are black and blank. I’m confused. here it is anyway to see what they are? (This was after the update)
Following! My phone updated overnight when; I have Developer Beta updates installed on my iPhone and is currently update to date. I noticed 9 previously deleted photos that were from December 2019-January 2020 that appear when I go to attach images from my messages but they do not appear in my gallery or anywhere in the order that it appears when viewed in my messages. Some of those are NSFW and can be viewed when selected. How can I delete something from view when it isn’t “really” there?
I just checked my photos, too… over 4,000 deleted photos are back in my regular album… this is insane.
I’m fully terrified of updating my iOS now. Does anyone know when it will be safe to update the software? 😅😅
question could you delete them again? or will they just appear back
Steve Jobs is jerking off in his grave :D enjoy - android
No iPadOS related issue?
I have this bug begween the old version of Photos “iPhoto” library that I often have to delete again every few years… the only solution apple genius found is for me to delete my cloud account which I really would like to avoid…
And if the photos show up even not logging to the same iCloud account (or not connected at all..) I think the problem is a device-side instead of a server/cloud-side…🤔
I just updated mine out of curiosity, same thing happened to me too! At least for me it’s good because I had a bunch of pictures I regretted deleting, very strange. It is concerning tho for privacy reasons. I hope if they release an update it won’t automatically delete everything that’s been recovered off our devices, that’d kinda suck.
is it just pictures or videos too?
Some of my deleted videos and pictures from long time ago appeared on a new just configured device. Somehow it’s been downloaded from somewhere because it’s a NEW device. Never been pictures and videos on that one!! And NO, I don’t have iCloud Photos turned on.
This happening in the uk or just USA ?
Ran into this same issue yesterday. A group of photos from 2020 just appeared in my Recents. However, I don't believe any of them had been deleted. And this happened to me PRIOR to updating to 17.5. Super odd.
ETA: The old photos all have a strange file name with "incoming" as the common prefix.
So you are saying pictures that were supposed to be deleted 4 years ago are not deleted from Apple servers? Wtf
why the fucking mod deleted the post?
Why did the mods delete this post?
Why did the mods delete this post?
Love how mods are trying to censor this
why mod delete this post?