Apple’s Photo Bug Exposes the Myth of ‘Deleted’
Last week, an alarming complaint popped up from iPhone owners on Reddit and elsewhere: Old photos, long since deleted, had resurfaced in their Photos app. Vacations, nudes, concerts, all unexpectedly returned like an unwelcome Pet Sematary cat. Today Apple finally acknowledged the bug and pushed out a fix. But the incident underscores a forgotten truth of memories in the digital age. Deletion is a myth, or at the very least a little white lie.
The firsthand stories about undead photos have been disturbing: A Redditor posted last week that some “nsfw” material they had captured with their partner years ago, when they were living apart due to Covid, had suddenly resurfaced at the most recent part of their photo roll. That original post has since been removed by Reddit moderators, but other Redditors in the thread said they, too, were now seeing previously purged photos, some from as far back as 2010.
Apple hasn’t responded to requests for technical explanations as to why this was happening, and indeed only confirmed that it was happening at all in the iOS 17.5.1 update notes it pushed out today: “This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.”
