Deleting Saved Photos in Messages

This year’s release of iOS 15 introduced some new inter-app communications in the form of Shared with You, a feature that automatically grabs links and photos from Message conversations and collects them in their appropriate apps.

In most cases, this just displays an extra panel of shared links in places like Safari, Music, and News, but with Photos it goes a bit deeper, and it’s resulted in one of the more obscure — but potentially dangerous — bugs that we’ve seen in iOS 15.

Under the right set of circumstances, you can end up losing saved photos for good if you’re not careful.

The problem occurs when you receive a photo in a Messages conversation, save it to your camera roll, and then delete the original conversation thread. Thanks to the new Shared With You link between Messages and Photos, it seems that deleting the conversation thread also deletes all the photos from that conversation thread that you’ve saved into your Photos library.

One of the aspects of the new Shared with You feature in iOS 15 is to dynamically insert relevant photos from Messages into your Photos timeline, even when you haven’t explicitly saved them. What appears to be happening here, however, is that iOS 15 is confusing those automatically inserted photos with ones that you’ve explicitly saved. It’s totally understandable that the automatically inserted photos should disappear when you delete a Messages conversation, but those you’ve deliberately saved shouldn’t go away with them.

Fortunately, the easy workaround to this is just to avoid deleting any conversation threads from Messages that happen to contain photos you may want to keep.

Granted, this may not be something that most users do all that often, since usually if a conversation is important enough to justify saving a photo, it’s likely also important enough to keep around. This may explain why it was missed not only by Apple’s own engineers but by thousands of developers and public beta testers over the summer.