Photos not recognizing previous imports

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Photos not recognizing previous imports

Hi All,

I have just upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra on my late 2012 Mac and am having a problem with photos now wanting to reimport more than 4000 previously imported photos (over the previous 20 months) when I connect my iphone XS. Both phone and imac software are up to date. These photos and videos too are on the iphone as jpg and h.264 files but are being imported to photos as heic and hevc files. If i transfer the photos by airdrop to my downloads folder they are in jpg/h.264 format. If I import to photos from the downloads folder images also remain in original jpg format.

I did try a few things without effect including: changing the iphone photo settings to keep originals vs automatic without effect and turning off/on icloud photos on my iphone (imac is not connected to icloud photos).

I should say that the reason I upgraded to high sierra was because i had run into problems uploading any photos from my iphone XS to photos. This could only be resolved by deleting all of this years photos from the iPhone and it would seem to reset then and start uploading photos or videos. However the recent issue happens as well with my wife's iphone X and she never had any upload issues before the high sierra upgrade.

If anyone has had similar problems I would be interested to hear and if someone can suggest a solution I would be grateful for the help.

Kind Regards Andrew

Posted on May 8, 2019 11:06 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

195,065 points

May 9, 2019 12:40 AM in response to andrewfromsorrento

Are you using iCloud with Photos? Is iCloud Photos Library enabled, or my Photo Stream, or both?

If any of the iCloud services are enabled, the duplicate detection on import will no longer work, because it is looking for identical files, and files, that have been converted from heic to jpeg cannot be recognized as duplicates. if you are mixing iCloud syncing with manual import by USB, you have to select the new photos manually.

These photos and videos too are on the iphone as jpg and h.264 files but are being imported to photos as heic and hevc files.

This is strange. If you are having JPEGs on the iPhone, they will be imported to the Mac as JPEGs and not as HEIC files. Probably there are the original HEIC files on the iPhone as well, and with the Setting "automatic" in the "Settings > Transfer to Mac" section the HEIC files may be converted to JPEG on the import, and thus the original HEIC files will always show as new files, because only the JPEG version is on your Mac.

With High Sierra you have a Mac that can handle HEIC and HEVC well, so I would set the Settings > Photos >TRANSFER TO MAC OR PC section to Keep Originals. And set the Camera to use the high efficiency formats HEIC and HEVC. This will make any format conversions unnecessary and the transfer by USB should be able to recognize duplicates again.

But you will have first to delete all items from the iPhone, that have already been imported to the Mac as JPEGs or H.264.

And then stick either solely to USB import or iCloud, and not mix these import methods.

Just in case you have not yet seen this support document: Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices - Apple Support

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Answer 2

May 9, 2019 1:42 PM in response to léonie

Many thanks leonie for your detailed and prompt response. I think I understand better now what the issues are.

You are correct I was using icloud with photos but just on my phone, not the mac, and both iCloud Photos Library and my Photo Stream were both enabled on the phone. I should point out i was incorrect stating that the files on my iphone were jpg and h.264. Uploading some to a USB drive and reading the file details it seems that the 'new' files were in fact heic and hevc.

I think I will follow your advice and dump icloud for my photo back up since i have a huge photos library and instead plan to back it up to external drives as before.

Can I ask you what a good strategy might be to identify and delete all offending jpgs/h.264 files from my phone given that i have four family members and multiple cameras which have uploaded images to my photos library and at least 2 iphones with the same non-recognized duplicates problem ?

Thanks again,

Andrew

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Photos not recognizing previous imports

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