I sat on this for a few days hoping for more info from Apple or someone smarter than me, but people keep reporting that after updating their iPhones to iOS 17.5, photos they've deleted are reappearing. You may have heard it took place on a device that was wiped, removed from an iCloud account and sold to another person, but the person that made that claim on Reddit has since deleted their post - so I would take that with a grain of salt. What does seem to be happening more commonly however are problems with iCloud Photos and deleted photos reappearing for the same user on the same device. That still sucks and shouldn't be happening in 2024 on such an established system, but it's at least somewhat explainable compared to a magic SSD file recovery scheme and kinda on-trend for iCloud being a bit shit at internet sync.
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