Apple has released iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 earlier this week, and unfortunately there seems to be a problem with it – apart from the OLED iPad Pros are experiencing a color reproduction error.
We're talking about old, deleted photos resurfacing. In some cases, these photos were deleted years ago, but are reappearing in users' libraries. Suffice it to say, this is a huge privacy problem, if somehow there are still photos on Apple's servers that should no longer exist.
A user on Reddit reports that old photos deleted in 2021 are suddenly resurfacing and appearing as “recently uploaded” to iCloud. Several other Redditors subsequently confirmed the problem. For another user, four specific photos keep coming back even after being deleted repeatedly.
This is disturbing to say the least. It's not clear what's going on and what's causing this behavior, but it's safe to assume that no one would expect that photos deleted years ago could still “come back to life,” so to speak, since the album Recently Deleted should be deleted. keep items for only 30 days.
Apple hasn't acknowledged the problem yet, but hopefully it will soon, and if we're not asking too much, we'd love to hear a factual explanation of how this could happen in addition to the inevitable fix.
While attempting to fix a photo sync error that occurred in iOS 17.3, Apple may have inadvertently caused the problem, some speculate. Interestingly, some users who were running iOS 17.5 developer beta 4 before iOS 17.5 was released for everyone reported very similar issues, yet were clearly ignored.