iOS 13 Photos sync through iTunes causes duplicate photos on iOS devices

Same hear with my iPhone. If you edit, delete or add a photo in your library on your Mac and start another sync., iTunes deletes all photos on your device and starts a new sync. It's weird.

I've downgraded to IOS 12 and all is perfect.

+1, this same exact issue is happening to me. I've got 30k photos & videos in my Photos Library, but after syncing my phone shows 50k photos & videos.

For each duplicate pair on my phone, I found that one photo has location data and the other does not have location data. I think this might be a bug with the new iOS 13 feature that was introduced to allow you to Include/Exclude Location or Include/Exclude All Photos Data when sharing a photo.

Does anyone else see this pattern with their duplicate synced photos?

All right guys -

I have been in a remote wilderness since I last posted here, so I took a while to get back to troubleshooting this, but wanted to tell everyone that I fixed this problem today, and it took very little effort!

I figured that the issue had to be with my Photos app on the laptop, and not with the phone, or with the new Finder sync. I have all of my photos (22,000) organized perfectly into folders of where each was taken. All of those folders are in Finder on my mac, and are in Albums in Photos. I sync everything from Photos to my phone (versus syncing directly from the folders in Finder). When I look at each of the 100 or so Albums that I have in Photos (under the Albums>My Albums menu on the left), there are NO DUPLICATES AT ALL in any of the albums. They are all exactly how I wanted them to be on my phone...BUT, when I click on Library>Photos on the left I see thousands of duplicate and triplicate photos. They only appear there, NOT in any of the Albums that I created and thought that I was syncing.

I got this app from the App Store today:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photos-duplicate-cleaner/id592704001?mt=12&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

And I carefully followed these instructions on how to use it:

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/02/15/how-to-remove-duplicate-photos-on-mac/

It found that I had over 22,000 duplicated and triplicated photos. They ONLY show up in the Library>Photos section of Photos though, which is what your phone is using when is syncs.

After deleting all of the duplicates, I synced my phone again and it went from having 47,000 photos on it, to having 22,000. No more duplicates.

Hope this works for the rest of you. This wasn't a macOS Catalina issue, nor was it an iOS issue. It was an issue with Photos having thousands of duplicates, seemingly from me not importing them correctly when I did it.

I started a thread on this too. Syncing is completely busted even on the latest macOS 10.15.1 and iOS 13.2.0.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250731717

I've done everything you have too. It seems to work the first time, but on the second sync, I get duplicates and missing photos. Something is seriously wrong.

the best thing we all can do is to report this issue at https://www.apple.com/feedback/. provide as much details as possible and provide a link to this thread. more reports will help get attention for issue to be fixed.

To expand upon MacLmR’s solution, I repeated this with the same set of conditions, save for one—I used iOS 13.3.1, the current GA release.

I removed all of the photos and the backup directory (and the iPod Photo Cache, to test a theory), and re-synced. The duplicates are gone (at least for now, through a few additional syncs, but I’ve seen that happen before), but the outright missing photos (zero-byte .ithmb files) are still an issue, which I can temporarily work around with my previous not-quite-a-solution solution.

Absent more action from Apple, I expect the duplicates to return over time, and I expect photos to disappear again, but… a workaround is still a workaround, however briefly it continues to work.

The fact that Apple is no longer enabling Photo Stream for new accounts doesn't inspire hope it will resolve problems with other legacy Photo capabilities, including iTunes syncing. I think it's easy to read between the lines of Apple's own support pages where they nudge new accounts toward iCloud Photos: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201317

However skeevy a corporate practice, it may be simpler for Apple to simply outwait the complaints of longtime users until one by one they give up and their roar dies down to a whimper. Is anyone still bugging them to bring back built-in optical drives? iOS 14 is on the horizon, to be announced next month and with betas deployed after that... the further iOS12's flawless syncing recedes into the past, I'm afraid the easier it will be for Apple to tune-out the past.

Mac (Catalina 10.15.1)

iPhone 11 Pro Max (13.2.2)

Exactly the same issue here

Absolute nightmare every time I perform a sync with my photos

I have around 20,000 photos and every time I sync there is some sort of issues:-

* duplicates appearing randomly

• photos disappearing altogether (has reduced 20,000 photos to 8,000 for no reason)

Like others have said I like to keep all my photos with me, hence the reason for buying the biggest capacity iPhone

It just seems to have a mind of its own and does things randomly.

I try a number of things to try and get it back to normal but I am not sure which one of them works as it is hit or miss.

* I go into Photos go to preferences, click on General and Show Photo Library in Finder and double click on it

* I click on the Photos Tab on the syncing finder window and switch between sync all photos and sync all albums

I am not sure if any particular one of them works but it works sometimes and then when I sync again it goes back to randomly doing whatever it wants to do again

Apple need to sort it out

Same issue. I've been syncing my photos originally from the iPhotos, then Photos app on MacOS to iOS for many years. Never used iCloud, just use manual sync.

Since Dec 2019 it's been completely broken:

• Takes 1-2 hours to sync and phone gets warm, when it used to take 2-3 min (would just sync the last few new photos)
• Sometimes after those 1-2 hours nothing has synced
• Sometimes it's randomly duplicated thousands of photos

To then get rid of the dupes is a nightmare - very difficult. Can require hours of randomly unsyncing your entire library, syncing it, checking options etc. Leaves dupes behind which seem to be almost impossible to remove sometimes.

In its current state photos sync is entirely non-functional for me.

In short form: NO!

(16k photos, iMac with High Sierra, 10.13.6)

• Before Updating, i unchecked "sync photos" and synced to delete. About 9k, i assume duplicates have been left.
• I reseted my iPad, 0 photos left, fine.
• Updated to 13.4, checked "sync photos", synced, all 16k on the iPad, fine.
• 16h later, 2nd sync, fine
• another 8h later, 3rd sync, it does 9k again

In between i did nothing in my Photos App on my Mac.

It's so frustrating.

Interesting. But we know a few things:

• only time will tell if v13.5.1 actually addresses the bug. We’ve had many instances in the last year where an iOS13 update initially seemed to fix it only to not be the case. After multiple syncs over two weeks or so with no duplicates then maybe they have finally addressed it.

• the photos count between devices has always had issues- from iOS2 and the very beginning. Not sure why but it’s well documented. So, first things first, don’t worry about the counter too much. The main thing is that the count stays consistent and there are no duplicates.

Hi, I had this issue too. I solved this matter by

1. Deleting all sync photos from my iPhone 11 Pro Max (ios 13.6.1)
2. Deleting "iPod photo cache" in the sync folder.
3. Restart PC (Win 8.1, iTunes 12.10.8.5) and iphone.
4. Restart sync with iphone on airplane mode with no interactions with PC till sync completes.

Hi MacLmR, I'm glad I came across this post. I too am having the exact same problem and think it's since iOS13. Synching from iTunes to iPhone XS, I was getting duplicate photos, off which 1 was deletable & 1 wasn't. A second issue I had was iTunes didn't recognise some formats such as .Tiff & .jpg as opposed to .JPG which would synch over. Also .MOV files would not synch even though they are all recognised in the Photos App. I was able to convert those .jpg files to "screenshot" .png files and successfully synch them, but that is very time consuming. When I deleted all photos to start again, that process may take up to 3 goes to remove all photos. So with my latest attempt to synch 21/1/20, again not all photos were transferred and 20 hrs later my iPhone is still trying to synch. I am in ongoing talks with my 5th Apple senior advisor at the moment. I'm not sure whether Apple know of the enormity of this issue.