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

The reason why that method works to resolve missing synced photos is because for whatever reason, something in the Apple Photos 5.0 (the version used in Catalina) corrupts the photo library, and the built-in database repair mechanism doesn’t actually fix it.

This is the problem—within your photos library, in the iPod Photo Cache, you’ll find another version of all of the photos that you’ve configured to sync to your device. For whatever reason, the files that don’t sync are versions that are zero bytes—devoid of content.

There was a time when deleting the entire iPod Photo Cache folder—which forces Apple Photos (and iPhoto, before it) to completely regenerate these files—would resolve the issue. But that’s not working in the Catalina version. A rebuild of the cache just creates the same zero-byte files.

Because there’s nothing wrong with the original photos, exporting them into a fresh, new library allows them to sync. Here’s the issue with that “solution,” though—exporting the original version of these photos, deleting them from the library, re-importing them back into the same library, and then performing a sync also works.

This is only a workaround, though, because I don’t know what causes this issue to happen in the first place. It can happen at any point, including to photos first imported with this version of Apple Photos which successfully synced at some point.

8. It would seem iTunes top middle activity bar is not showing the behind the scene synching still carrying on.

So being patient and allowing time seems to help

There’s a limit to this, though, and there’s an easy way to find out whether or not the Mac is still actively syncing anything to the iOS device. Look to the disk section of the activity monitor on your Mac.

If no data is being actively read from the disk for long durations, then it’s certainly not actively syncing photos to your device.

In truth, I could leave my iPhones or iPad connected to the Mac for days at a time, and it still wouldn’t clear the “syncing” message at the bottom of iOS photo albums. I know this because I’ve tried.

To add injury to insult, my music is also duplicating itself! All I’ve done is a basic sync to my computer, the same way I’ve done it for the last decade. Random photos and random songs duplicating every time I sync.

Apple please fix this issue. I used to hate the Windows bloatware, but this is the mother of all bloatware, and it’s an issue that has not been fixed since last year. I’m an Apple loyalist but honestly on my last thread with Apple due to software bugs like this all too frequent.

iCloud Photos does allow creation of albums, both in iOS and in Mac OS. See attached screenshots. Also, albums created in Photos on an iOS device automatically show up in Photos on the Mac, and vice versa, because iCloud syncing is built-in. It is, however, an all-inclusive process, so you can't select just certain albums on a Mac to sync to your iOS device(s).th

Okay. I have contributed many posts to this thread about the photo duplication issue. My workout to date has been to periodically ensure all my photos are on Mac Photos, then to delete all the photos from iPhone and resync once. This removes the dupes and lets me enjoy some level of satisfaction with a broken system.

I just discovered that the process I use to delete all photos no longer functions with iOS 13.6.1. Previously you could go to SETTINGS > GENERAL > iPhone Storage > PHOTOS and swipe left on Photos to remove all files within the Photos app, including videos. THEN you could resync with Mac and all your photos would display just like on Mac.

Now this doesn’t work anymore. There is now NO easy way to delete all photos from the iPhone, short of a total reset.

Selecting hundreds of photos as a group to delete also doesn’t work, as the delete button doesn’t appear, instead only offering to ‘remove from album’ but this button does nothing.

This is infuriating, given the headache Apples software has given me this workaround was my one solace. Am I alone in this?

Anyone else having this issue?

Same problem here with my iPhone XS Max and iOS 13.1. I'm transferring my photos from an iMac mid 2010 with High Sierra. In addition to the duplicates problem, some photos are not synced (about 80 of a total of 18000). Really annoying!

Mac (Catalina 10.15)

iPhone 11 Pro Max (13.1.2)

iPad Pro 11 (13.1.2)

I have the same issue. I have 27K photos in my Mac "Photos" library. I sync to my iPhone 11 Pro and iPad Pro 11 and some photos get duplicated on sync. Then I have to delete all by un-checking. Not to mention when the photos are synced and duplicates occur more storage on both devices in being used.

(On previous phones and OS I used to love to have all my photos in my pocket... now I only sync selected photos due to this bug).

Same here when I was using Max OS X 10.14 and upgraded to Catalina 10.15 and things got even worse. Removed all photos from my iOS devices and resync it again, but andsynced a few photos from the "Photo"'s library.

Same here. Worked on my iPhone XS Max iOS 12 + iPad Pro iOS 12 syncing photo library from my iMac on Mojave)

(All screwed up as mentioned now with Catalina on my iMac and both my iPhone 11 pro and iPad Pro using latest iOS 13.1.2)

Hopefully enough people have this issue and Apple will fix this bug.

Even the Mac OS Photos does not work proerply after upgradiing to Catalina. Every time I import new photos from an external drive, it takes only 5-10 seconds to find the new photos to import,while I. Catalina a it took over 3-4 minutes and some of the new photos are still missing.

Same issue here. I’ve synced using Apple Photos as the source, and have synced using the actual albums in Finder as the source, and I end up with 3+ copies of thousands and thousands of photos. I’m using Catalina.

When I look at them in Albums they are not duplicated but when you go to All Photos, they are rampantly duplicated. My 250GB 8+ ran out of storage because of this duplicate photo issue.

Today I turned on iCloud Photos on my iPhone to erase the 50,000 photos that were synced to the phone yesterday. I then turned it off and started a new sync, using MacOS Photos as the source. The duplicates showed up again, some are duplicated once, most are duplicated up to 4 times.

All of the photos duplicated on my phone have location data.

I think they need to fix both iOS and MacOS probably to fix this problem...

The Mac OS X Catalina Photos App is so buggy it just keeps crashing and hanging, while the Sync to iOS devices moves to Finder, all the "Copying Photos from..." just disappear

Maybe, but I'm having the problem with High Sierra and iOS 13.1 / 13.2. I have another device (iPad Air) with iOS 12.4.2 and it sync works perfectly with the same computer and photos library, so I think iOS version is the responsible of this issue.