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We finally have a better understanding of why devices running iOS 17.5 started resurfacing long-deleted photos<\/a>, courtesy of Apple and some third-party researchers. While Apple released the iOS 17.5.1 iPhone<\/a> update to fix the issue earlier this week, attributing it to a \u201cdatabase corruption,\u201d the company remained tight-lipped<\/a> about what was specifically causing old files \u2014 including deleted nudes, in some reports \u2014 to start appearing on devices that never hosted them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Elaborating on the issue to 9to5Mac<\/em><\/a>, Apple says it was caused by a corrupt database entry on the device\u2019s file system, impacting files on the devices themselves and not those that had been synced to iCloud. Those files may have been carried over from older devices when restored from a backup or during device-to-device transfer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Apple says it doesn\u2019t have access to photo or video files on users\u2019 phones, and that only a small number of people were impacted<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One Reddit user had previously claimed in a now-deleted post<\/a> that the iOS 17.5 bug had resurfaced photos on an iPad that had been wiped and sold to a friend. Apple, however, claims this isn\u2019t possible, telling 9to5Mac<\/em> that all files and content are permanently deleted once a device\u2019s data has been completely erased. Essentially, Apple is claiming this user either didn\u2019t follow the correct device reset procedure<\/a> or is simply lying for Reddit clout. The company said that only a small number of people were impacted by the database issue, and that Apple doesn\u2019t have access to photo or video files on users\u2019 phones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Security researchers at Synactiv also expanded on the issue by reverse-engineering the iOS 17.5.1 update used to fix it. You can find a detailed explanation in their full report here<\/a>, but in short, iOS 17.5 added a migration routine responsible for scanning and re-importing photos from the filesystem. The routine was deleted by Apple\u2019s recent update because it caused old files to be re-indexed on the local file system and pushed back into photo galleries.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cBased on this code, we can say that the photos that reappeared were still lying around on the filesystems and that they were just found by the migration routine added in iOS 17.5,\u201d said Synacktiv. \u201cBased only on this analysis, it is not possible to conclude how the photos remained on the filesystem in the first place.\u201d The Synacktiv article then directs readers to this comment on Reddit<\/a> for a plausible explanation, which includes the possibility of users saving images to both the File app and Photos app and only deleting the latter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n