Putting my developer hat on and reading various reports - this smells like Apple had a really bad data loss bug which they quietly fixed by attempting to automatically recover lost photos from some corner of the database that still might have the data. Such as the thumbnail database or a cache.
Backups people. Make sure you have good backups and for your most precious photos not just digital ones - print them. And send a physical copy to your grandparents as a gift - they’ll love it and it will be one more place you can recover that photo of your kid’s birthday if you ever need to
And if you don’t want something in a photo… don’t take the photo.
Backing this stuff up is really difficult. The vast majority of macs don’t have enough storage to keep everything local. If you put it on an external drive then it disables some features.
My solution is to keep an old Mac as a backup device that keeps all the files local and backs them up. But that’s far more than most people are prepared to do.
Putting my developer hat on and reading various reports - this smells like Apple had a really bad data loss bug which they quietly fixed by attempting to automatically recover lost photos from some corner of the database that still might have the data. Such as the thumbnail database or a cache.
Backups people. Make sure you have good backups and for your most precious photos not just digital ones - print them. And send a physical copy to your grandparents as a gift - they’ll love it and it will be one more place you can recover that photo of your kid’s birthday if you ever need to
And if you don’t want something in a photo… don’t take the photo.
Backing this stuff up is really difficult. The vast majority of macs don’t have enough storage to keep everything local. If you put it on an external drive then it disables some features.
My solution is to keep an old Mac as a backup device that keeps all the files local and backs them up. But that’s far more than most people are prepared to do.