After installing the iOS 17.5 or iPad OS 17.5 update, you might find a surprise or two (or three, or four…) among your photos. According to several user reports online, Update 17.5 can restore photos you've deleted long after the 30-day recovery period has expired.
Which could lead to an embarrassing situation. A Reddit post said some of the revived photos contained “NSFW material,” and another said: “My photos turned up on an old iPad I gave to a friend.”
A user in the Reddit thread who claims to be an Apple QA employee says that what happens is that the photos sent via messages are saved in the photo library, and the solution is to delete the old messages. However, a separate user responded that the recovered photos were not sent to anyone. Also, some users with this issue use iCloud Photos, while others don't.
As others have pointed out (in this Reddit thread and in other reports), when you delete a file — including a photo — the file is not actually deleted. What happens is that the reference to it disappears, but the file remains there until another file overwrites it. But you might think that if a photo was deleted years ago and you regularly take new photos, there will be many chances to overwrite the old photo.
Apple has not commented on this issue, but you can likely expect an update to the first point to address it soon. Many users reported that this issue was present in beta 17.5, but it is unknown if this is a widespread issue or not. I installed the iOS 17.5 update after it was released on Monday and are no longer haunted by any old deleted photos, thankfully.
Translated by Peter Ahrnstedt
This article was originally from our sister publication Macworld Translated from English.
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