Here’s why deleted iPhone photos came back on some iOS devices

We finally have a better understanding of why iOS 17.5 devices started showing long-deleted photos, courtesy of Apple and third-party researchers. Although Apple earlier this week rolled out an iPhone update to iOS 17.5.1 to fix the problem, attributing it to “database corruption,” the company did not disclose what caused the old file – in some reports including deleted files – to start showing up on devices that have never supported them.

Problem development to 9 to 5MacApple says the cause was a corrupt database entry in the device’s file system, affecting files on the devices themselves, not those that were synced to iCloud. These files may have been transferred from older devices when restoring from a backup or when transferring from device to device.

One Reddit user previously claimed in a now-deleted post that an iOS 17.5 bug caused photos to reappear on an iPad that had been wiped and sold to a friend. However, Apple says this is not possible 9 to 5Mac that all files and content will be permanently deleted once the data is completely deleted from the device. Essentially, Apple is claiming that this user either didn’t follow the correct procedure to reset the device or is simply lying to gain influence on Reddit. The company said that only a small number of people were affected by the database problem and that Apple does not have access to photo or video files on users’ phones.

Security researchers at Synactiv also expanded on this issue by reverse-engineering the iOS 17.5.1 update used to address this issue. You can find a detailed explanation in their full report here, but in short, iOS 17.5 added a migration routine responsible for scanning and re-importing photos from the file system. The procedure was removed by a recent Apple update because it caused old files to be re-indexed on the local file system and placed back into photo galleries.

“Based on this code, we can tell that the photos that reappeared were still on the file systems and were just found by the migration routine added in iOS 17.5,” Synacktiv said. “From this analysis alone, it is impossible to determine how the photos remained on the file system.” The Synacktiv article then directs readers to this Reddit comment for a plausible explanation, which includes the ability for users to save images to both the File app and the Photos app and only delete the latter.