Nudes are back, the hype is changing. Why and where did deleted photos appear on iPhone?

Last week, Apple made a mistake that will hang over the claims of their marketers for a long time. Having installed iOS 17.5, the iPhone owner began to enter the library of smartphones that had long been deleted.

Around this issue, a whole raft of rumors, political scandals and speculation quickly re-established itself. Someone on the street cheated on his significant other because the deleted nuds were saved. Others recalled forgotten moments from the past.

Still others are outraged: how was this accepted with a company that constantly shows itself to be the last bastion of data protection and privacy? Even conspiracy theorists came out of the dugout shouting about a tear.

With this phenomenon from the very beginning there was Is there something wrong. Everything looked much more complicated than what was written about in the media. The director’s photographs did not appear for everyone, according to an incomprehensible principle – and not all, but just not some part of them. And most importantly, they were regulated for those who did not even connect to the Internet after installing the new OS. Data cannot appear out of thin air.

Now that Apple has acknowledged and corrected the problem by updating iPhones to iOS 17.5.1, I offer my point of view on what happened. I suffered from this bug, like many others, and I was able to find several features in this material.

I will present all these facts here, and at the end we will draw a conclusion with you. I’ll say it straight, especially for those who came to our site and this article for the first time: I’m not looking for a way to justify Apple, and I don’t stand out as blind fanaticism. Let’s think carefully and objectively.

What facts exist today

1. Not everyone has photo restorers. The only thing that unites all cases is that the recovered photos were once saved on the device.

Ignore any connection between getting your deleted photos back and the age of your device, device model, Apple ID country, and a whole bunch of other factors.

2. Not all deleted photos were recovered. This means that there is some kind of principle, some have only deleted photos of the director, while others do not.

If everything had been different, this article would not have been here, and Apple would have ended up with billions of dollars in investments. Moreover, when this article ends, you will understand that Apple will most likely come out of this situation almost dry.

3. Photo restorers have even appeared on smartphones that were recently purchased. For example, I have been using the iPhone 15 Pro Max for no more than a month, but I still have some photos taken 5, 7, 9 years ago on the iPhone 4s and iPhone 5.

4. Information that users’ photos are frozen after erasing data and entering a different Apple ID is almost guaranteed to be fake. The author of this hype complaint on Reddit failed to utter a single acknowledgment, research the questions in the style of a “Forchan” troll, and ultimately deleted the post.

What I noticed after going through several thousand recovered photos on my iPhone

A photo of either a colleague or future wife, taken while preparing a review of the Apple Watch in 2015. I deleted it 7 years ago. The last photos of my last one, which I managed to take and accidentally deleted a long time ago. Overall, the bug brought back a lot of cool memories – I’m even glad.

Firstly, as a singer I had more than five thousand distinctive features set. By specific I mean that:

▪ among them there were no nudes (this is the critical moment!)
▪ almost all the pictures were lit either with family or shooting for work
▪ whole “packs” of events and activities have been collected; at the same time, “neighboring” in dates, but then deleted, the photos were not directed by the directors, which I confirmed by checking with the regularly updated personal offline-up of all frames

Why is the lack of nudes important? Because I never sent them to anyone. I didn’t send them and my wife. We agreed 15 years ago that they should not be sent to the Internet under any circumstances. Beliefs are tracked and monitored today, including when they started communicating via iMessage and pinning photos there daily.

There are and always have been nudes in their own right, including hundreds and thousands of daring ones. And not one of them returned. It’s not just like that, I promise.

Secondly, after a thorough check of the media library, I began to notice originality: Most of the “returned” photos I didn’t just take or upload to the iPhone with my Apple ID, but somehow interacted with them. For example, I know that I put the entire stack of photos from IFA in Berlin into files on iOS and deleted them from Photo. As a result, they are back in the media library. I remember that I messaged my wife and son via iMessage to at least 90% of the survey participants.

Finally, after installing iPadOS 17.5, my son got as many as 200 GB of video files. I learned about this when my family’s iCloud storage suddenly became full. At the same time, the videos that returned were once sent by him via iMessage to other relatives, or saved in Files for (and after) editing in tablet installation programs.

From all this we have a conclusion. Very boring and not even outrageous

The theory goes like this.

iOS 17.5 erroneously adjusted and added photos and videos to your Library that are still stored in your iCloud account in file and attachment formats. Namely:

▸ sent to someone via iMessage and then deleted from Photo

▸ received in iMessage, saved, then deleted from Photo

▸ saved as if from WhatsApp messengers, but then deleted
▸ ever added to the app Files

This theory answers questions of state and does not contradict any observance. From it you can guess that iOS 17.5 Indexing of photo and video files was carried out incorrectly, is still stored in the user’s iCloud outside the Photo library. For example, iMessage chats, WhatsApp, Telegram caches, iCloud Drive/File traditions. All this then fell into the media library, including what was later deleted by the user.

In this case, Apple, by the way, can wash its hands. The fact that the user deleted the photo from Photo, does not mean that it is still not on the device in any form. The company does not make such a promise. Now, if the user deleted it from all caches, including caches of application components (for which Apple is not responsible), then it would be a different matter. But this is still necessary…

Finally, this is why Apple suddenly opened the problem and released an update confirming the problems described right in the description. They have nothing to fear.

How does the theory as a whole compare to the truth? I’m 90% sure. Well, then we will wait for an explanation from Apple, because the largest Western media are increasingly requesting them.