iOS 17.5 bug resurfaces old deleted photos for some reason

Apple released iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 earlier this week, and unfortunately there seems to be a problem with it - aside from the OLED iPad Pros experiencing a color reproduction bug.

We're talking about old, deleted photos resurfacing. In some cases, these photos were deleted years ago, but they're reappearing in users' libraries. Suffice it to say, this is a huge privacy problem, if photos that should have ceased to exist are somehow still around on Apple's servers.

One user over on Reddit reports seeing old photos deleted back in 2021 suddenly resurfacing and showing up as "recently uploaded" to iCloud. Multiple other Redditors then confirmed the issue. For another user, four specific photos keep resurfacing even after being deleted repeatedly, over and over again.

This is troubling to say the least. It's not clear what's going on and what is causing this behavior, but it's safe to assume that no one would expect photos deleted years ago to still be able to 'come back to life' as it were, seeing as how the Recently Deleted album should only hold stuff for 30 days.

Apple hasn't acknowledged the issue yet, but hopefully it will soon, and, if we're not asking too much, we'd like to hear an actual explanation of how this could happen alongside the inevitable fix.

In attempting to fix a photo syncing bug that occurred in iOS 17.3, Apple may have inadvertently caused this issue, some speculate. Interestingly, some users that ran iOS 17.5 developer beta 4 before iOS 17.5 was released to everybody reported very similar issues, and yet were obviously ignored.

Source | Via