Unable to sync photos to iPhone

Question

Unable to sync photos to iPhone

I have an iPhone 3G. I updated it to 3.0 yesterday. After the update, I removed my photos from my iPhone. I then tried to sync them back. After syncing would finish the capacity bar would show a really small size for the photos section, like 400 kb, when I was trying to sync a folder with many pictures and a much greater size. After syncing, the photos weren't on the iphone.

I restored the phone to a backup and the problem persisted. I restored the phone to original conditions and the photos syncing worked at first. For some reason now, after I sync my music and apps, I have about 50-70 mb of free space although I get the following message when I try to sync a folder with a few photos: "No photos were copied to the iPhone because there is not enough free space on the phone to hold your photos and albums". I'm trying to sync a folder a 4.5 mb iPod Photo Cache and 7 images ranging in size from 14 kb to 105 kb. What on earth could possibly be causing this? Anyone experiencing the same or a similar problem?

BTW, I'm running windows vista 64-bit, if that makes any difference.

Message was edited by: vik713

Message was edited by: vik713

Message was edited by: vik713

iPhone OS 3.0

Posted on Jun 18, 2009 3:43 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 18, 2009 4:50 PM in response to Community User

Hiya! Man my stuff got deleted! I think I said soooomething like:

First, if you restore as a troubleshooting step, be sure to restore as a new iPhone and not from a backup. Secondly, if the problem was fixed and started after syncing Apps, that may be the cause. I recommend starting again and syncing a few Apps at a time and that will help isolate to the one that is causing this.

Here is more information regarding to this issue:

"Not enough free space" alert when trying to sync
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1503

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Answer 2

Jun 18, 2009 8:34 PM in response to Madelline

Ok. I Unsynced all my music, leaving the iphone with around 14 gb of free space. I then synced photos and they appeared in the iphone. Then I proceeded to sync my music back to the iPhone and guess what. I get the same **** message again: "No photos were copied to the iPhone because there is not enough free space on the phone to hold your photos and albums.". So I remove some music and sync again, making sure that I have sufficient space left for photos. I have about 50 mb left and once again, I get the message. I never had this problem before I upgraded to 3.0. Help!

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Answer 3

Jun 19, 2009 5:05 AM in response to Community User

Hmmm... 50mb doesn't sound like it would be enough... Definitely wouldn't be enough for all my photos! Did you check the file size of all your photos? I recommend putting all the photos you want to sync to your phone in one folder and make sure the file size does not come too close to 50mb so you can have some room to grow.

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Answer 4

Jun 19, 2009 12:38 PM in response to Madelline

As mentioned, I was trying to sync a folder with 7 images ranging in kb. Add in the iPod Photo Cache folder that is automatically created when you sync a folder and the total is around 5-7 mh, definitely lower than 50 mb.

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Answer 5

Jun 19, 2009 5:26 PM in response to Community User

I had the exact same problem. I have about 7mb of pics that I keep on my phone. I had about 85mb of space left on the phone and it wouldn't sync my pics. I deleted another 100 mb of music and the pics sync'd without a problem. Seems like a lot of wasted necessary space though...

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Answer 6

Jun 19, 2009 11:52 PM in response to aschneider

^ Yep, I'm getting similar results. I freed up about 100mb of space and interestingly, I was able to sync 8 out of 10 photos from a folder and I still got the same message. Then I deleted the photos and some music and made 107mb of space and I could snyc all 10 photos from the folder without getting the message. This is ridiculous. I have to have over 100 mb of free space to sync a couple of photos?! Apple better fix this!

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Answer 7

Jun 20, 2009 5:14 AM in response to Community User

It is absurd considering I believe there is already swap space built into the OS. I would really like to see a definitive answer on how much free space is needed though...

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Answer 8

Jun 22, 2009 7:31 PM in response to aschneider

Bump, incase anyone else is experiencing the same problem or has a solution.

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Answer 9

kevpatts

Level 1

1 points

Jul 9, 2009 10:41 AM in response to Community User

I have the same problem. I'm trying to sync only 2 albums of photos from iPhoto, totaling 52 photos (approx 80Mb) and there is 196Mb free on my iPhone, but I get the same message.

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Answer 10

tokatta

Level 3

869 points

Jul 17, 2009 12:37 PM in response to kevpatts

This just started happening to me. Everything is still on my phone - nothing has been erased or removed from the phone. iTunes says I have 85 MB free too.

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Answer 11

igz

Level 1

14 points

Aug 4, 2009 8:12 AM in response to Community User

Same issue here. It is infuriating. I've got 85MB free and it won't copy over 7MB of photos. It does when i clear up 100+MB of space. Not acceptable.

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Answer 12

jsaucy

Level 1

9 points

Aug 21, 2009 10:31 AM in response to igz

I'm having a similiar problem. My photos won't sync at all from my computer to my IPhone. I've taken it in to the Apple store and they said it is a Vista issue. I also can't get my phone to stop syncing. When I plug in my phone to sync it the "sync in progress" label on my phone won't go away. I have 6.56GB of free space on my phone. No music, photos, & a couple of apps. HELP!

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Answer 13

paaul028

Level 1

0 points

Sep 9, 2009 7:04 PM in response to jsaucy

I also have the same issue now since I updated to the newest software today, version 3.1.

And ever since the 3.0 update I had an with issue seeing new pictures in Camera roll so i guess they are linked.

Pain as it means i can no longer mail pics from camera roll and now I cannot add pictures to the camera folders even though there is 1gb of space and the pictures are less than 77 kb.

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Answer 14

Sep 9, 2009 7:44 PM in response to paaul028

Paaul, I have the same issue: All of my music, videos, photos, etc. were syncing just fine to my iPhone with the 3.0.1 software. I upgraded to 3.1 today, and now I am getting an error saying there's not enough space to sync all my photos over, even though no photos have been added or deleted. To eliminate the problem, I am having to remove one CD's worth of music from my songs. The free space shows as well over 300 MB.

Apple needs to do some work on how they manage free space and the mysterious "Other" category. I'm a little annoyed at not being able to use closer to all of my space.

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Answer 15

Touch16

Level 1

5 points

Sep 10, 2009 12:37 PM in response to Clayton C. Johanson

Same issue here, I can't with ceratinty it happens with the 3.1.1 upgrade since I was also adding some music and apps, but even though I have more than 270MB of free space (according to the summary) I'm only able to sync 20 photos from the 90 that I was able in the past.

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