For those unfamiliar with the platform, it offers a unified experience where you can manage your photos, videos, calendar, files, and other important information on your Windows PC. Several users have submitted their complaints and concerns through the Macrumors forums indicating that they are seeing photos of strangers in their photo libraries.
Some users see other people’s iCloud photos
This issue seems to focus on users using the iPhone 13 Pro or the iPhone 14 Pro. In addition, some users have also complained that they cannot view the videos they have recorded with their iPhones and have synced them with iCloud for Windows. When trying to play the videos appears a black screen with scan lines. The strange and random photos appearing in some users’ photo libraries are apparently of families, children, and random soccer games. According to one of the affected users:
iCloud for Windows is corrupting recorded videos from iPhone 14 pro max resulting in black videos with scan lines. On rare occasions, it is inserting still images into videos from unknown sources, possibly others’ iCloud accounts. He has shown me pictures of other people’s families that I haven’t seen in my life, football games and other random pictures. Obviously, this is extremely worrisome and doesn’t exactly make me feel secure using iCloud.
As a solution to this problem, some users have tried clearing iCloud for Windows, but this did not solve the problem. This could be an indication that the problem is more technical and could originate from the server. In other related news, Windows Insiders have recently received a new Photos app that is compatible with iCloud.