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

Oh, wow… I finally just discovered at least one correlation on the missing photos; I see that it’s consistent.

If I select an image to be used as the key photo for a person in Apple Photos on the Mac, it eventually no longer syncs to my iOS devices. Its .ithmb file in the iPod Photo Cache will become zero bytes.

Yes, I have over 20000 photos and videos. It does take some time. After removing the photos and restarting a fresh sync, I notice at the end when the sync has "ended" that my phone is still adding photos from the library. Im not seeing any duplicates though on my end, which is somewhat of an improvement

Hello,

I had also duplicates when I synced my iPhone to my Mac.

I tried many things with Apple support online several times without success.

As I change my Mac, I decide to do a clean install and it solved my problem.

I hope it's helpful.

Best

FWIW ----

Having all kinds of sync problem for it seems over a year now. Just noticed now that used space on iPad for photos shows aprox 30 gigs when it should be closer to 16. So I updated to 13.4.1 to check out if its fixed. Nope. Now iPad shows 30 gigs for actually 16 gigs worth and now when I plug iPad into finder, Finder shows 2.73 gigs for the same photos. But, here's something interesting, on the iPad when in all photos view, I see duplicates. I can then go on the iPad to the folder containing the duplicates I see in the all pictures view and there are no duplicates... Folder view, no duplicates. All pictures view, duplicates This is B***SH*T..... Really!?! "It Just Works". What a shameful joke.

I've been following this topic from the beginning, and still no resolution from Apple.

I was having the issue on my iPhone 8+. I bought a new iPhone 11 Pro today and synced my photos. I now have triplicates of my photos on the 11 Pro. Each one has location data, so the people that posted that one photo has it and one doesn't; I've checked 20+ triplicate photos and every single one has location below it...so that's not the bug.

I am going to turn off sync, and then sync YET AGAIN, and see if I can remove the triplicates. I also am going to record the amount of storage that the triplicates take up on the phone and see if it goes down when there aren't duplicates or triplicates after a new sync.

HOW IS THIS STILL A PROBLEM?!?!?! Apple should have fixed this LONG AGO.

photos app curated out my duplicates too after many hours of plugging in and waiting for it to complete....

I had some missing photos after the synchronisation with the iPad and I understood that it was my fault. After copying them to Photos, I changed the folder and/or changed the name of the Photo. So, for that cases, I deleted them and copied them again to solve the problem.

I finally upgraded my MacBook Pro Mid 2009 (upgraded RAM and SSDHD) to a MacBook Pro 16” 2019 due to MASSIVE photo and data duplication problems that consumed my 500gb HD with duplicates and 350GB of ‘Other’ data that proved too pernicious to remove. Photos had 4 and sometimes 5 copies of the same photo for reasons unknown to me. Every time I synced my phone more duplicates were made. I figured a new computer might fix the issue.

Silly me to think a software bug as obvious as photo duplications would be resolved by Apple. It’s becoming apparent that Apples business plan is two-fold based around consuming your harddrive space with extraneous data duplications and then feeding you into their iCloud data services to create user dependency that is deceptively

difficult to pull away from should you try.

I have received Apple customer service for two hours trying to fix photo duplication issues between my iPhone 8 running 13.4.1 and brand new MacBook Pro Running Catalina 10.15.4 and have been working intermittently for weeks and still have problems with Apple software duplicating photos and sync errors. It all used to ‘just work’. No longer unfortunately.

Why does my entire photo album need to be deleted and replaced on iPhone with every small change? Makes no sense.

I even have financial stock In Apple because I know their business plan is a piranha.

Don’t even get me started on Apple Music.

Good luck. It’s May 2020 and I’m having the same issue.

i agree. except i'm a bit cynical about it all. i wrote a letter (yes, an actual letter) to a senior executive at apple. and as a result of that, was assigned an "executive liaison" to follow my case. hours on the phone. logs sent. spreadsheets i created sent.

the eventual solution? "wait for an update." and my case was marked closed by the executive liaison. when i called to ask how/why, he condescendingly read from a script and ended the call.

i have 40k photos. i have zero interest in paying for them to be managed by icloud, despite the helpful/dubious suggestions of others on this board that icloud is the way forward. you can sync selected playlists -- not your whole library. why you cannot simply do the same with photos after ios13 is infuriating (if you think about if for too long, and i try not to).

eventually, if this issue is not resolved, i will look for a new organization method -- potentially amazon or google. and at that point, the untethering of my wallet and apple will begin.

I’m in a similar situation. I also tried rebuilding my Photos library and that still did not resolve the issue. Now every single time the iPhone is connected, it decides to erase all photos and then re-sync, regardless of what duration option I select (last month, all photos, etc.). And it takes forever (despite me having the latest Mac mini with a high end configuration. I have the latest Mac OS and iOS. It’s as if nobody at Apple has tested photos sync with a Mac with more than a few hundred photos in the last couple months.

Apple has once ****** me off to offer no (symbolic) concession after I lost priceless baby photos due to a clear design gap/bug when you use time machine + iCloud photos and disable iCloud photos, and using time machine for photos is crude and hard to use. I once tried to restore my library after some corruption made Photos freeze on startup and I spent hours on this stressful experience (and I consider myself somewhat tech aware as a software engineer).

Amazon offers a Mac native app and an iOS app to upload. I have already purchased extra storage with Amazon Photos and I rely on it to keep my library backed up to the cloud (Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but these are my own personal opinions for personal use cases as a long time Apple user who has spent thousands of dollars on Apple hardware).

I updated to 10s 13.5.1 today, synced with itunes. After sync, I no longer see duplicate photos, but the photos count on phone is less than on mac. So many photos are not synced.

Will need to do multiple syncs to see if problem of duplicate photos is "really" fixed.

I am syncing with macOS majave/itunes with cable.

If a photo is not deleted from the iPhone after it is downloaded to Mac, then the original photo as well as the synced photo will appear under All Photos in the iPhone.

The sync error here is additional duplications of photos, even photos that were not taken with the current device.

I have not had luck with the update fixing this issue unfortunately.

Thank you BuddyJack for the info. Yes, those types of simple albums, iCloud does support. What I have on my Mac pictures app are albums per year (1970-2020) and in those albums I have sub folders with each event. In one year album I may have 12 different folders, one for each major event such as a cruise or a large picnic or a wedding or a road trip, etc. That media of organization, iCloud cannot accomplish. Ive been using iTunes/Finder to download many but not all of those albums onto my phone and iPad. Only in the last couple years have I had the duplication/triplication problem. I know I'm not the only one with this problem so I'm 99% sure its Apples software problems which I wish they would correct.

Late to this, but I've just started noticing this and same behaviour occurs - one pic without a listed location and a duplicate with a location attached. Seems to be random, as well, in terms of which is duplicated. Also sync is transferring 1,800+ photos each time (I have about 5,000 photos in albums that a marked to be synced) even when there's only a handful of new ones. Did you get to the bottom of the problem?

I've just undertaken the laborious task of deleting the duplicated photos from my iPhone caused by the synch issue: There were 4 different photos which were duplicated, dating from various periods over the last few years, none of them recent. Those 4 photos were duplicated a total of 680 times. Given that I've just been nagged by iCloud that my my storage account is near capacity, the cynic within me wonders if this is some sort of sales wheeze to persuade customers to buy more cloud storage.

Guys, pardon me for butting in....been using Apple since 89. I have all my complaints, BUT, from just hacking around I wish to bring up 2 rather simplistic possibilities. As an NP I diagnose things to simplest cause..Occam's razor.

1.You can simply reset the phone, assuming you have backups...and your photos will automatically be updated from the cloud. 2.Also check if you have optimization feature turned on or off, this will make a difference in the quality.

Since I have grumblingly moved with the times, rather than become a dinosaur, I have slowly waded through software no longer supported, different storage methods etc.

Different photo apps have replaced superannuated other versions, and I have updated them, and now are stored in different albums.

Living in a hurricane zone, using redundancy helps. Dropbox will save your photos automatically, if you set that option.

Amazon offers free photo storage. Flash drives are cheap for large scaled back ups. And I now have a collection of hard drives.

Migrated to LaCie 2Big Raid driver, and now have both Time Machine, and La Cie backups.

for 2.99 a month you can get 200 GB on iCloud. might be easier than fussing about it.

Aloha!