iPhone owners are reporting that photos they’d deleted are now back on their phones, after updating to iOS 17.5.

With so many users reporting similar oddities, it would seem something went wrong, or at least different than to be expected. Here are some examples from Reddit:

“When in conversation with my partner, I went to send a picture and saw that the latest pictures were nsfw material we’d made years ago”

“I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly.”

“Same thing happened to me. Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023.”

When you delete a photo from an iPhone or iPad, it goes into a “Recently deleted” album for up to 30 days to make it easy to recover if the photo is accidentally deleted. However, the above examples vastly exceed this timeframe, and it’s unclear exactly what’s happened here.

When you delete a file, actually all that happens is you remove the pointer that tells you where exactly the file is located. This makes it hard to find, but not impossible. Until the system uses the location of the deleted file and replaces it with other data, the file can be retrieved.

Apple’s last update for iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 came out on Monday with a warning to update your iPhone as soon as possible. That’s because iOS 17.5 fixes 15 security vulnerabilities, some of which are serious. Please don’t let this article stop you from installing the update, but it’s good to be prepared for some unexpected behavior.

At the time of writing, Apple hasn’t commented on the issue.

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Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your mobile devices by downloading Malwarebytes for iOS, and Malwarebytes for Android today.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

If you've ever sent an iPhone in for repair, you might be familiar with the dance Apple asks you to do if your device still powers on: back up your data, then either erase the phone or disable the Find My feature so your phone can easily be serviced (or, if it's being exchanged for a new one, refurbished and resold). If you're also using the Stolen Device Protection and Security Delay feature introduced in iOS 17.3, this can be a pain, since you need to wait a full hour to turn Find My off after you make the request.

It looks like Apple is making some changes to that process in iOS 17.5, which is currently in beta testing. The update adds a new "repair state" mode that leaves the device functional while keeping both Find My and Activation Lock enabled. This means that iPhones swiped while in transit will still be trackable and that they'll still stay locked to your Apple ID so they can't easily be wiped and resold.

MacRumors has a good overview of the feature as it currently functions. You can set an iPhone to repair state mode by pulling it up in the Find My app and attempting to remove the device from your account while it’s still online and active. Rather than removing the device from your account, the app will offer to put it in the repair state instead; unlike when you try to disable Find My entirely, this doesn't trigger the one-hour Security Delay waiting period. If your phone is offline, Find My will offer to remove it from your account, as it currently does.

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