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.”
Patrick Wardle, cofounder of DoubleYou, a startup building macOS security components, says he can’t determine exactly what went wrong without more details from Apple. But it’s possible at least a few things happened: The photo metadata may have been set incorrectly or corrupted during deletion; the photos marked for deletion weren’t actually deleted; or this iOS update didn’t adhere to the deletion marking.
“This type of data corruption issue is probably more common than not in terms of bugs,” Wardle says. “But when there’s an immediate and visual impact to the user, it gets a little more attention.”
The issue did appear to affect only a limited number of people. But it’s an important reminder for everyone that “delete” is illusory in the age of cloud services.
Even back in the era when most of our digital data was stored on hard disk drives, the concept of deletion was somewhat superficial. When you put a file on your personal computer out to pasture, you were only really deleting references to it; the actual file would remain there until the disc was overwritten with new data.
Ever since the launch of iCloud in 2011, and then Google Photos a few years later, the world’s biggest tech companies have been nudging consumers more and more toward storing photos (and other personal documents) in their clouds. This is incredibly useful when your app-loaded phone starts to run out of on-device storage space; it’s also partly what made us frogs boiling in subscription water, as Apple especially grows its services business.
The resurfacing of deleted photos isn’t new, and it’s not even limited to the cloud giants. Over a decade ago I saw an odd thing happen in a new photo storage app I was testing: A set of photos I was sure I had deleted resurfaced in the app again. These were visually distinct photos from a trip to Japan, pops of pink cherry blossoms and kodachrome kimonos in the album of a pretty mundane life, so they stood out. It was only a specific subset of photos that I had deleted. But, nope, there they were again. I notified the app’s creators; they said it was a bug. Later the app was acquired by Amazon, which meant my photos were acquired by Amazon too.