iCloud for Windows users complain about uploading photos and videos that don’t belong to them and corrupting personal ones

iPhone owners who use the iCloud for Windows app to access their photo and video collections from their PCs are complaining that their albums are populated with unknown photos uploaded from other users’ accounts. At the same time, some videos recorded and then uploaded to the iCloud account using the Windows app are irreparably damaged and cannot be viewed.

Certainly most worrying is the popular problem of iCloud albums with unknown photos, most likely taken from other users’ accounts. The error, which is prone to serious breaches of user privacy, can lead to all sorts of embarrassing situations, with the most personal photos ending up being viewed by complete strangers.

According to testimony from a disgruntled user, “iCloud for Windows corrupts recorded videos from iPhone 14 Pro Max phones, resulting in videos with black lines. On rare occasions, pictures from unknown sources, possibly other users’ iCloud accounts, are inserted into the videos. I’ve been shown pictures of families of people I’ve never seen, football games and other random pictures. Obviously, this is extremely worrying and doesn’t make me feel safe using iCloud.”

Apparently, the problems manifest exclusively in the Apple-developed iCloud for Windows app, not the native Windows 11 Photos app, which Microsoft recently improved by adding iCloud Photos integration. With this, iPhone owners with a Windows 11 PC will be able to view their photo collections directly on their monitor screen, without having to manually download them from their iCloud account, or to use the dedicated app provided by Apple.