With the help of Apple and some third-party researchers, we now have a deeper understanding of why long-deleted photos are resurfacing on devices running iOS 17.5. While Apple released the iOS 17.5.1 iPhone update earlier this week to fix this issue, attributing it to "database corruption," the company remains tight-lipped on the specifics of what is causing old files (including deleted nude photos in some reports) to start appearing on devices that have never hosted them before.
Apple has provided a detailed explanation to 9to5Mac, stating that the issue is caused by corrupted database entries on the device's file system, affecting the device's own files rather than those already synced to iCloud. These files may have been transferred from an old device during a backup restore or device-to-device transfer.
A Reddit user previously claimed in a now-deleted post that a bug in iOS 17.5 caused photos to reappear on an iPad that had been wiped clean and sold to a friend. However, Apple refuted this, telling 9to5Mac that once a device's data is completely erased, all files and content are permanently removed.
Essentially, Apple asserts that the user either did not follow the correct device reset procedure or was simply fabricating the story for influence on Reddit. The company stated that only a few individuals were affected by the database issue, and Apple cannot access photos or videos on users' phones.
Security researchers at Synacktiv further analyzed the iOS 17.5.1 update used to address the issue through reverse engineering. While a detailed explanation can be found in their full report, in essence, iOS 17.5 introduced a migration routine responsible for scanning and reimporting photos from the file system. Apple's recent update removed this routine as it was causing old files to be reindexed in the local file system and pushed back into the photo library.
Synacktiv stated, "Based on this code snippet, we can say that the reappearing photos are still in the file system, they are just being found by the migration routine added in iOS 17.5." This analysis alone does not definitively explain how these photos remained in the file system. Synacktiv's article then directs readers to a Reddit comment for a plausible explanation, suggesting that users may have saved images to both a file app and the photo app, but only deleted the latter.
Read the full report here:
