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Last week, an alarming complaint popped up from iPhone owners on Reddit and elsewhere: Old photos, long since deleted, had resurfaced in their Photos app. Vacations, nudes, concerts, all unexpectedly returned like an unwelcome Pet Sematary cat. Today Apple finally acknowledged the bug and pushed out a fix. But the incident underscores a forgotten truth of memories in the digital age. Deletion is a myth, or at the very least a little white lie.
The firsthand stories about undead photos have been disturbing: A Redditor posted last week that some “nsfw” material they had captured with their partner years ago, when they were living apart due to Covid, had suddenly resurfaced at the most recent part of their photo roll. That original post has since been removed by Reddit moderators, but other Redditors in the thread said they, too, were now seeing previously purged photos, some from as far back as 2010.
Apple hasn’t responded to requests for technical explanations as to why this was happening, and indeed only confirmed that it was happening at all in the iOS 17.5.1 update notes it pushed out today: “This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.”
Patrick Wardle, cofounder of DoubleYou, a startup building macOS security components, says he can’t determine exactly what went wrong without more details from Apple. But it’s possible at least a few things happened: The photo metadata may have been set incorrectly or corrupted during deletion; the photos marked for deletion weren’t actually deleted; or this iOS update didn’t adhere to the deletion marking.
“This type of data corruption issue is probably more common than not in terms of bugs,” Wardle says. “But when there’s an immediate and visual impact to the user, it gets a little more attention.”
The issue did appear to affect only a limited number of people. But it’s an important reminder for everyone that “delete” is illusory in the age of cloud services.
Even back in the era when most of our digital data was stored on hard disk drives, the concept of deletion was somewhat superficial. When you put a file on your personal computer out to pasture, you were only really deleting references to it; the actual file would remain there until the disc was overwritten with new data.
Ever since the launch of iCloud in 2011, and then Google Photos a few years later, the world’s biggest tech companies have been nudging consumers more and more toward storing photos (and other personal documents) in their clouds. This is incredibly useful when your app-loaded phone starts to run out of on-device storage space; it’s also partly what made us frogs boiling in subscription water, as Apple especially grows its services business.
The resurfacing of deleted photos isn’t new, and it’s not even limited to the cloud giants. Over a decade ago I saw an odd thing happen in a new photo storage app I was testing: A set of photos I was sure I had deleted resurfaced in the app again. These were visually distinct photos from a trip to Japan, pops of pink cherry blossoms and kodachrome kimonos in the album of a pretty mundane life, so they stood out. It was only a specific subset of photos that I had deleted. But, nope, there they were again. I notified the app’s creators; they said it was a bug. Later the app was acquired by Amazon, which meant my photos were acquired by Amazon too.
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And even when it’s not a bug, there’s the simple fact that your photos are stored on both your device and someone else’s cloud. You do not own that cloud. You rent it from giant tech companies, every month, often for a fee, and the way that cloud operates isn’t remotely local. You can still delete your photos from the cloud, but you’re taking on faith that it actually happens.
“At a conceptual level the hard disk and cloud work the same,” Wardle says. “The cloud is just someone else’s computer. What happens in the cloud, though, is that it introduces more complexity—when you delete an image on your phone, it not only tells the local copy to be deleted but then the signal has to go to the cloud and, from there, to your other devices.”
So when you’re stuck on an airplane without decent Wi-Fi for five hours and you decide that the best time-killer is mercilessly culling your phone’s photo roll, as I sometimes do, you are in about as much control of what happens to your deleted photos as you are of the plane.
“Photos does not actually delete photos immediately when you tap the Delete button,” says Thomas Reed, director of technology at security firm Malwarebytes. “Instead, it puts deleted photos into a Recently Deleted list, and they’re no longer listed in any albums. So the actual file remains exactly where it was, but the internal Photos database remembers that it’s meant to be deleted.”
One framework for thinking about the deletion of photos in the year 2024 is that it really has different levels. In Google’s documentation for its cloud services, for example, the company details its stages of deletion—the soft deletion, the logical deletion, the eventual expiration. The company says that in all cloud products, copies of deleted data are marked as available storage and overwritten over time. Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”
There’s the windowed delete, where you may have accidentally swiped something to trash or rethought your hasty delete and want to recover it in short order. Both Apple and Google have policies where they retain your photos for 30 or 60 days after you have deleted them from your devices, so the “oh crap” lever is readily available. After that, the photos supposedly disappear from your device. (There’s also the inactive delete in Google Photos: If you happened to have created a Google Photos account and forgot about it for two years, Google might automatically delete your content.)
Then there’s the bizarro version of delete where you’re quite convinced you’ve gone through every single device and deleted your photos permanently, and then a restore from an old iCloud backup or a pernicious little iOS bug resurfaces those photos. Surprise! That appears to be what triggered this latest incident.
There’s also the you-can-never-unshare delete: Once you’ve sent photo to someone else or posted it on social media, it lives in the hands of others who might download it, screenshot it, or share it elsewhere, barring legal action that requires deletion. So even if you’ve deleted it from your own devices, your personal bits (of data) are still out there.
So, are your photos ever really deleted? Yes. Also, no. Maybe big tech companies should do even more to clarify this.
We didn’t choose to live in this era of digital memories, but we do get to choose how we frame them for our own personal use. Is it better to live as though your near-term digital photos are creating some kind of permanent imprint somewhere, or to throw caution to the wind knowing that in the very long term most of your digital photos will mean very little? After 28,941 photos on my iPhone and in the cloud—and the risk of more deleted ones returning—I still don’t know the answer.
