Apple Has a Solution That Will Prevent Your Deleted Photos From Coming Back
When you delete a photo from your iPhone, you expect it to be gone forever. But that’s not what iOS 17.5 users experienced : After the update, some users discovered that their deleted photos had suddenly returned from the grave, with no clear reason. Understandably, people were concerned (they did delete the photos, after all).
Whatever the cause of the bug, at least a positive development can now be reported: Apple today released iOS 17.5.1 with one note in the changelog: “This update contains important bug fixes and resolves a rare issue where photos, Once in the database, the corruption may reappear in the photo library even if the photos are deleted.”
How to Prevent Deleted Photos from Reappearing on Your iPhone
If these release notes are to be believed, once installed, iOS 17.5.1 will prevent deleted photos from reappearing in your library. This is great news, although perhaps not entirely reassuring. Without an explicit explanation as to why it happened in the first place, who’s to say it won’t happen again?
As a reminder, when you delete a photo from your iPhone, it doesn’t immediately disappear. Instead, it disappears from your photo library and goes into your Recently Deleted folder, protected by a password or Face ID, for 30 days. You have one month to reverse your decision and return it to your library. However, after those 30 days, iOS will permanently remove the photo from your library. (You also have the option to manually remove it from this folder at any time during that month.)
It’s possible that some of the photos that reappeared due to this error were retrieved from the Recently Deleted folder. But when it comes to photos that were definitely deleted , other explanations are possible. After all, any digital file is usually not destroyed immediately after deletion. Technically, information—whether it’s a text file or a racy photo—remains on the disk until the system needs that space to store new information, at which point the original data is overwritten. Perhaps iOS mistakenly received this data before it was overwritten? It’s hard to say, and Apple isn’t telling us anything.
While there is no guarantee that we won’t experience a similar error, Apple says this latest update fixes the issue. So if you want to prevent deleted photos from appearing again in your Photos library, your best choice would be to update to iOS 17.5.1.
How to Update iPhone to Stop Deleted Photos from Reappearing
To update your iPhone to iOS 17.5.1, go to Settings > General > Software Update , then follow the onscreen instructions to download and install the update.