Recently, Apple rolled out iOS 17.5, a update that unintentionally brought back old photos onto some devices. Users reported several troubling incidents, including the reappearance of intimate images. Apple has since released iOS 17.5.1 to address the issue, though questions about the root cause remained. The origins of the Verge story behind the update’s behavior were not clear until now.
Current reports point to a corrupt file system database entry on user devices as the culprit. This bug affected only local device storage and did not compromise files stored in iCloud. Apple confirmed that a small subset of devices showed restored photos after users failed to complete memory clearing steps properly. In those cases, undeleted data lingered in the file system database and reappeared when the device synchronized with iCloud.
Synactiv conducted an independent analysis of the iOS 17.5.1 update and reverse engineered the changes introduced in iOS 17.5. It appears that iOS 17.5 included a migration routine designed to scan and re-import photos within the file system. The 17.5.1 patch removes or bypasses this process, which is the mechanism responsible for re-indexing older files locally and bringing back previously deleted photos.
Synactiv noted that photos deleted from an iPhone can remain on the device until the space they occupy is overwritten by new data. Their code review indicates that the recovered images persisted in the file system and surfaced through the migration step introduced with iOS 17.5.
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