Did you update your iPhone to iOS 17.5 on Monday, May 13? Well, it’s time to do it again, as iOS 17.5.1 has already landed. It’s a smaller update and it has just one function: to fix an issue with the key Photos app.
iOS 17.5.1 has just been released.
Updated May 23, first published on May 20, 2024.
Responses to the new update continue to be positive, not to say helpful. The clearest explanation of what may have been going on (remember, Apple still hasn’t said what caused the issue beyond describing it as database corruption, and there’s no mention of how it manifests itself), came from a user on Reddit. They said, “It’s pretty straightforward. A database keeps track of the files. It was marked to delete but removed from the database before it was actually deleted, so just sat around. Repairing the database by scanning the file systems brings it back because now it doesn’t know if it’s deleted or not.”
Another commented that it may have been that the file accidentally remained while the database entry was deleted. They said, “Some engineer added a “fix” by having 17.5 scan for any lost files in the system and adding them back to the database, so the user could decide what to do with it.” The same user wryly commented, “Someone actually thought that was a good idea.”
Whatever the cause, it seems increasingly likely that it’s been fixed now and the consensus is that this was never a privacy problem. As YouTuber Brandon Butch pointed out, “There is no privacy, security risk, anything like that because this is all on-device and with your iCloud account. Nobody else has access to these photos other than you.”
And it looks like in some cases photos had been deleted from the Photos app but not the Files app and this could have led them to reappear, Brandon Butch says. That may not be the full story, though, as some users reported images which dated back to before the time that the Files app existed.
That said, many users will have been relieved that Apple released this update in record time, especially if they’d deleted photos and sold their device, as happened to some users who found their photos reappearing on what was now somebody else’s iPad. The issue has affected more devices than just the iPhone, with updates released for iPad and Apple TV as well.
As Victoria Song commented in The Verge, “A reasonable person would expect a deleted file to stay that way. That’s why it’s understandable that people freaked out last week when photos deleted years ago had suddenly reappeared in their iPhone photo library.”
That publication’s issue relates to the fact that Apple has not yet made any public comment about the issue, beyond describing it as “rare” in the release notes for the update.
In that comment, Apple describes it as down to database corruption, and it seems that all the zombie images restored to life will have been ones that were on-device, not in the cloud.
As Song puts it, “If anything, Apple ought to comment simply because it markets itself as a company that cares about your privacy.”
Which iPhones Can Run iOS 17.5.1?
If you have an iPhone Xs, iPhone Xs Max or iPhone XR from 2018, or any more recent iPhone, then yours is compatible. That means the iPhone 11 series, iPhone 12 series, iPhone 13 series, iPhone 14 series and iPhone 15 series. This also includes iPhone SE second- and third-generation models.
How To Get It
You know the routine by now, but just in case: open the Settings app, click on General, then Software Update. Here you can choose to download the new software now, that’ll usually mean it’s on your iPhone sooner. Pick Download and Install, and you’ll be golden soon enough.
What’s In The Release
This release is focused on the bug which surfaced in iOS 17.5, which Apple describes in the release notes as “a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.”
This has been a controversial issue, even if it has been rare. It has meant that images which had been deleted, years ago in some cases, popped up again when iOS 17.5 was installed, to users’ surprise and dismay. Apple has still not revealed how it has happened, though most likely it is something as straightforward as how images are deleted on an iPhone or iPad. When you click delete, the data that makes up the image isn’t overwritten, merely disconnected.
Those data files would have been overwritten only when that part of the storage was needed, so could have remained hidden until then. Something in iOS 17.5 brought them back to life.
This update, which also “provides important bug fixes,” as Apple puts it, aims to ensure the zombie photos are now a thing of the past.
This has been especially important for anyone who has given their iPhone away or sold it, and wouldn’t want old photos to magically come back.