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

I’m speechless but it appears that, indeed, iOS14 has brought the fix! As to be expected, iOS13 was all along the culprit. No more duplicate photos, except for expected duplicates due to photos being in multiple or shared albums and the duplicates due to not ‘Deleting items after import’.

On iPhone you can delete all the Recent photos once you copy them over to Mac, then when you sync you will just get a single thumbnail for each photo. It won’t be the original photo, so you can only delete it via the Mac.

HORRAY! Crossing my toes that it never gets screw it up with future software updates again!

This problem appears to be caused by the way Apple synchronizes photos in iOS devices. iOS defaults to storing all photos in iCloud. As long as you do that, the bug doesn’t seem to manifest itself when synchronizing.

When you’ve collected lots of photos, and run out of space in iCloud to store them, you get two choices. The default choice is to buy extra space in iCloud. The alternative choice is to stop using iCloud for photo storage, and instead back up your photos on a computer, which results in the duplication on your iOS device. On my own devices, this sometimes resulted in a gigantic “other“ on the devices, making things even worse.

I now use a program called iMazing to back up my iOS devices. The way around photo duplication is to have iMazing restore my iOS devices without restoring the photos. I then use iTunes to reload the photos along with the music. Note that this requires me to store all music and photos on the computer I use for backing up all my iOS devices. This works fine for me since 99% of my music is from CDs, and I want to keep my music and photos backed up myself rather than relying on an online service. My entire computer is backed up automatically, to multiple drives, on regular schedules using Carbon Copy Cloner.

P.S. I have no interest (financial or otherwise) in the companies that make/sell iMazing or Carbon Copy Cloner. I use those programs because they’re more reliable and versatile than Apple software (imo). As a retired computer specialist, I prefer software that is highly reliable and not overly confusing or complicated.

How I managed to get this work is to turn on iCloud photos on my iPhone, which will get rid of all the photos in iPhone, and then turn off iCloud photos, and re-sync with iTunes. This way, I managed to get all my photos and videos synced over to my iPhone without freezing or duplicates. It just takes a longer time. Hope this help some people.

Not sure if this will be helpful.. I wasn't having issues with duplicate files, but missing images on the IOS side. I'll admit that in a hasty decision earlier today, I installed the beta of iOS 13.4.. I'm not frankly sure if that has anything to do with my results, YMMV. What I will note is that installing the beta did NOT solve my particular issue (missing images) before I resorted to what I have written below.. I tried syncing numerous times with just the beta upgrade and that resulted in ZERO change. I wasn't missing many -- about 6-7 but 1 missing is too many IMHO.

What fixed it for me.. I purchased FatCat Software's PowerPhotos.. What I then did was create a brand-new Photos library (you can use PowerPhotos for that directly or just hold down the Option key while opening Photos and select Create New. Once that new library is available, fire up PowerPhotos and use the Library->Merge Libraries feature to merge the old library into the new one. Interestingly enough, that shrunk my 3yo library from about 34gb to 18gb in size. Once that was done, I went back into Photos (hold down the Option key while starting to select the new one).. Once you're happy, go into Preferences and select that new library as the System Library.. Once that is done re-sync your IOS device.. For now this is working -- perhaps not a long term solution as I suspect the problem may return as the photos library gets other crap in it..

I tried looking and figuring out why the two libraries were vastly different.. The masters.legacy folder in the old library was not present in the new library -- just the "originals" folder (which is present in both). Perhaps that's a Mojave left-over..? Anyway, IF you try this method, PLEASE ensure that you backup the original library somewhere JUST IN CASE!!

It seems that the problem has finally been solved with iOS 14. Now, if I add or delete one photo, just one photo is added or deleted, and no duplicates are generated. Before this, thousands of photos were deleted and copied again every sync, even if only one photo was added, deleted or edited. 78 photos from a total of 18031 are not synchronized with my iPhone, but this also happened before. Most of them are burst photos in which I selected only one of the frames and discarded the rest. I will investigate this point.

i just updated my iPhone 8+ to iOS14, and for me, Synch no longer duplicates photos, just adds the new ones.

WORKED FOR ME ! Hope it works for others...

I 've been following this thread since also experiencing this issue, plus a multitude of other syncing issues after I OS 13 and Catalina. I have not been able to sync a new i phone 11 max pro for photos without a hitch since purchase. The sync fails to sync albums in sub-folders. Attempting to correct this, I synced all my photos. I was able to sync without a problem. However, when I went to add a new photo, the corresponding sync copied most photos back in and doubled most photos in my phone's library. I then attempted to remove all photos through a sync. I believe that that sync kept all the photos in the library. I then tried to remove the photos by selecting, "select photos" without selecting any photos album, etc. The result was a reduction in photos and a removal of duplicates. I did this several times until I removed all the photos. I was not able to do it in one session. It took about five syncs to remove all the photos. Photo sync is definitely broken. I do not use the cloud for storage.

That’s exactly what I had to do too. I couldn’t get iTunes to sync all of the photos & their duplicates off my phone in one swoop. So I had to ask it to only sync 1 small album with 200 photos, so it would remove everything else. When the sync finished and there were still thousands of photos left, I had to select another small album, click sync again to trigger another refresh with this “change”, and repeat this process until my phone was down to 0 photos. Clearly the software is not optimized for albums larger than like 1,000 photos.

My library is at 30,000 photos & 3,000 videos now. How about yours?

I have been having the same issue ever since I bought my new MacBook Air and installed MacOS 10.15. When I synced photos to my iPhone 8, running iOS 13.3, from Photos via the Finder on the new MacBook Air almost all the photos doubled. Photos on my MacBook shows me as having a library of just over 8,000 photos and now I have just over 14,000 photos in my iPhone’s Photos app, again mostly doubles.

Interestingly, at the bottom of the iPhone’s Photos app, on the “All Photos” tab it says “syncing…” long after I have finished syncing my phone to my laptop and have unplugged the devices from one another.

At first I assumed this was a bug unique to MacOS 10.15, since I did not have this issue with my old MacBook, running MacOS10.13, even when I synced it to my phone running iOS 13. However, I experimented by trying to sync my old iPhone 4S, running iOS 9, with my new MacBook, and there were no issues with doubling photos. The photos from the Photos app running Catalina OS 10.15 synced just fine to an old iPhone using iOS 9.  

Therefore, I believe the issue must be with attempting to sync photos onto a device running iOS 13, from a Mac running MacOS10.15. This is a frustratingly regressive issue, that something so seemingly simple as syncing photos between Apple devices is suddenly such a headache, especially when it used to be so easy (I miss the iTunes sync). As someone else here posted, “a photos sync should just work.” Please fix this issue, Apple.

After so many weeks of struggling with this issue without finding any solution, I tried last week to connect my iPhone X to my Mac 5K with a new genuine Apple cable, thus replacing the genuine one I had for a few years already. And yes, after syncing the issue of duplicated pictures was gone. Yet, when syncing for the third time it simply came back.

So now I just untick the box of my most important photo folders, apply changes, tick those boxes again and then sync again. This works well but it takes a lot of time to sync this way and you have to repeat this process every 2nd or 3rd time syncing if you want to stay rid of duplicated pictures. And it's not only duplicated pictures, sometimes old pictures, no longer on the Mac, suddenly appear again, or the latest pictures are not synced at all. What a mess, very unApplish

For any given pair of duplicates on my iPhone, there's not much info that can be seen other than the inclusion/omission of explicit location. But as an experiment I tried emailing myself each of the photos in a pair of duplicates, one of each attached to its own separate email, and those emails arrived with attached photos of distinctly different names (e.g., "IMG_7115.JPG" and "IMG_9968.JPG"). From the higher numbering, I'm guessing "9968" would be the newer duplicate. I opened "9968" in Mac Photos and its info shows explicit location (i.e., "Home"), just as it does on my iPhone (btw, "IMG_7115.JPG" only said "Looking for location info" when I opened it in Mac Photos). I then tried sending both photos together, by selecting both to send with just one single email. Weirdly, even though I explicitly selected both, only one of them actually showed as being queued to send... and that's the only one that arrived once the email was sent (it's the duplicate, "9968," and once again, it correctly shows explicit location ("Home") in Photos on the Mac). My guess from these tests is that iOS13 Mail is somehow able to do what iOS13 Photos can't: namely, when Mail has to deal with both photos of a duplicate pair at once, it can differentiate which is the "better" of the two (the one with the explicit location info), and disregard the other. By contrast, when iOS13 Photos has to deal with duplicates, it can no longer determine which is the "better" of the two and so it keeps and displays both of them, rather than replacing the original with its "location-enhanced" version.

I have the same issue! I've spoken with THREE Level 2 folks and the ONLY solution is to re-sync my iOS device with "Sync Photo's" OFF and then RE-Sync with it turned back on. NORMALLY, that clears out the duplicates ... until I re-sync due to more new photo's being taken and added to the Photo Albums. NO ONE seems to think this is an actual problem ... except for us users! (PS> I DO NOT use iCloud for sync or backup! I'd run out of memory on my iOS devices!!

It’s pretty ridiculous how many of the photos it re-syncs upon iOS device sync.

Considering that, at least for me, photoanalysisd is either highly active or generally inactive for long periods at rather random intervals (regardless of whether or not Photos is a current running process), even when it’s been many hours or even days since I last did anything to any of the photos, it leads me to speculate that it’s writing and then re-writing the same face data to the same photos, which makes the MediaLibraryService think that the catalog entries have changed and therefore need to be recopied upon the next sync.

That problem isn’t new in either Catalina or iOS 13, though. As soon as Apple added facial recognition to iOS, iOS Photos has never actually been able to hold onto face data for synced photos. Upon sync, and arbitrary number of photos that were previously identified on iOS would be forgotten, even though they were never deliberately removed from the album by the end user, probably because the photos were removed and then recopied upon sync (for reasons unknown).

Apple’s implementation of device-side facial recognition has always been problematic, and for large libraries, it’s a terrible CPU hog. My one feature request there is the ability to completely turn it off.

I posted the only solution I’m aware of more than a month ago — which is to rebuild the photo library on the Mac side. Mine continues to work just fine without duplicates or missing photos. In my personal case, I would occasionally have dups but most of the time the quantity of photos between my Mac (running Catalina) and my iPad and iPhone 8+ would differ a fair amount. Once I rebuilt my photo library (which wasn’t that hard) then all the problems went away. I don’t pretend to know where the underlying problem lives but for now this is the only solution and it does require a 3rd party app to fix (unfortunately)..

Sorry... Just my $0.02 worth.. I’ve moved on as I’m happy with my temp fix. Hopefully Apple will address this soon, but IOS 13.5 isn’t it. I believe that the ultimate fix probably will be found as a Mac issue and not an IOS/IPadOS issue. I firmly believe the underlying issue is with junk that gets collected up in the original photo library over a long period of time/use/syncing,etc. YMMV. IF you go this route I’d HIGHLY suggest making a full copy of your photo library just in case!!