Serious iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Gets Worse

We’ve seen numerous complaints about iOS 17.5-related bugs and performance issues, but the bug reportedly impacting people’s photos rises above the rest.

Earlier this week, we saw a report on Reddit about a bug resurfacing old photos that had been deleted. At the time, it hadn’t picked up much traction. That’s changed and the bug has received a lot of attention this week.

The post has been upvoted over 500 times and there are now over 200 comments, some from iPhone users experiencing the problem on their iPhone after moving it to iOS 17.5.

The bug isn’t the same for everyone seeing it. Some users are seeing recently deleted photos resurface in their photo libraries while others claim the bug has brought back photos they deleted years ago.

Even more troubling, one user on Reddit claims that after wiping his iPad and selling it, the person who bought it called them and “said my old pictures appeared in their Photos app.” So it’s impacting iPadOS 17.5 as well it seems.

As of right now, it’s unclear what exactly is happening. There are some credible theories out there (it’s an indexing issue, it’s a syncing issue, it’s a device issue and unrelated to iCloud, and many others), but Apple hasn’t acknowledged the issue yet.

There doesn’t appear to be a permanent fix for the issue either. So for now, those worried about deleted photos coming to the surface should avoid iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 until we know more.

For what it’s worth, we haven’t seen the bug on any of our iPhone models running iOS 17.5. And we’ve deleted plenty of photos over the years.