Apple has clarified how people’s old photos started reappearing on their phones in the iOS 17.5 update.
Apple told 9t05Mac that these photos weren’t tied to users iCloud photo backups, but rather their device backups. On some older phones, when photos glitched while being deleted, they could still stay on the phone hidden from view, but attached to a device backup. Moreover, these deleted photos could move from one phone to another when transferring data from an old iPhone to new one via a wire.
Therefore, as people moved to newer iPhones and continued to use their device backups, those glitched photos tagged along for the ride. Yet they remained hidden until a line of code in the iOS 17.5 update dragged them back into your Photos library.
Apple has released an iOS 17.5.1 update that remedies the situation, but for anyone thinking that their photos weren’t deleted from their iCloud library, this shows that the photos were rightfully deleted originally. It’s also worth noting that if you were affected, you still need to go in and delete previously deleted photos yourself.
What does concern me is how much other junk we are dragging along when we update from our iCloud backups.
Source: 9to5Mac
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