So I upgraded to Catalina today, and then tried to sync my iPhone (knowing to expect differences with the upgrade due to the departure of iTunes). However, when connected, it just continues to sync, and there is no status bar to show the progress, so I'm left guessing where it's at, what it's doing. etc. It has been syncing now for over an hour, and still no signs of coming to an end any time soon. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Thank you for sharing all this information. I looked at the /~Library/Preferences/ directory and found that I have 56 com.apple.*.plist files. So do you think it is safe to delete them all? Most of them look like they are config type files. I am having a hard time pulling the trigger on the delete button.
Thank you for your post. Followed step by step to no avail.
How many countless hours have we all spent trying To FIX a problem that should JUST WORK? We paid good money to buy product from Apple and we are not paid to beta test or FIX THEIR PROBLEMS.
like many of you, I have a decade worth of organizing my 36,000 songs and playlist plus thousands of photos that I can no longer sync.
i ended up with 6 bricks.
Time for me to go duel boot to Windows 10 because oddly enough, iTunes for Windows has no problems even with my iPod.
the visionary has left the building.
SOLVED:
So I will not be updating any new updates for iTunes for Windows and downloading a copy of this version.
THIS IS TOTALLY INSANE! WHAT IS WRONG WITH APPLE THAT A BASIC FUNDAMENTAL AS SYNCING GET BROKEN WITHIN ITS OWN PRODUCT LINE.
TRULY UNBELIEVABLE.
Finally the sync worked today after I fiddled with attached storage (now removed) and after I went into the 'Music' menu item and found out that in the list of Artists and Albums blank items were 'on'. I did de-select those, restarted the iMac.
Also I made sure the iPhone was unlocked when attaching it to the USB-cable to link it to the iMac.
So
hopefully this is helpful
I keep my fingers crossed though......
Hi all, since 7. April everything works as expected, sync works correctly and automatically.
I had the same issues: iPhone X (13.4.1) and iMac with Catalina (10.15.4) not syncing right, producing double photos, never getting to an end with the sync symbol …
What I did:
Firstly, load all not already uploaded photos from the iPhone into Photos.app using the cable
Then:
That’s what did the trick on my system, and it behaves correctly since then. Good luck.
PS On the iPhone at the bottom of "All Photos" it will show "Syncing..." when sliding up, but nothing seems to happen now after the mentioned procedure. So this is probably still a bug, but since the rest works just fine, I don’t care. Or maybe it works only after a certain amount of time.
After you select iPhone in the Finder bar on left, there is an information pane that comes up. Photos is the third tab from the Right. I do not use iCloud for Photos, so it might vary, though probably it is just greyed out. Look at the screen shot below.
I too have problems with the Podcasts sync, It just shows a list of my old iTunes podcasts, some of which where deleted from iTunes more than a year ago. The new podcasts from the "Podcasts" app don't show up.
See picture below.
In the Podcasts sync part of my IOS devices in Finder I keep seeing all old podcasts there were EVER in iTunes, even some that were deleted over a year ago from iTunes.
Does anyone have the idea where that list is kept?
I deleted every .itl file I could find as well as several .plists related ot iTunes and Podcasts, some of them held the info of the deleted podcasts but there must be more.
Syncing iPhone XS (13.2) with Catalina just doesn't work, ref. my previous posts.
Laughingly I tried to sync my iPhone 1 (resurrected from my Apple working museum) on my MacBook Pro running Catalina, and ... it works! Maybe the problem is Catalina to/from iOS 13???
upgraded too to catalina and plugged the iphone in. Been syncing for hours now - what the h**l ? Finder also reset the sync when connected box - which i had unchecked. No progress status , nutin!!! This is ridiculous .....
Podcast sync is SO broken that I am losing faith in Apple's ability to release a quality product. This is alpha quality code. Either the podcast does not sync, or it creates a new "untitled" podcast on the phone and adds the podcast over there. Of course, the newly created podcast is not in my station list and I don't see it until I go looking for "untitled" podcasts. What a piece of garbage this is... I wish I had NEVER upgraded to Catalina.
iMac A2116, iPhone 6 Plus, 64GB
iPhone constantly syncing. No progress status bar icon. No pie chart progress icon.
iPhone memory bar shows as full (should be max 60% full). I have no idea what the extra 40% of DOCUMENTS AND DATA are.
Only files I can find add up to 719 KB
I upgraded from an 8 year old Mac to this one. Mac is 2 months old. So far I've had 4 very long sessions with Apple help for slow running, crashed Catalina update etc.
So disappointed with my purchase.
Additional -
Sync finally finished (1-2 hours)
Now iPhone is plugged in to Mac but the Backups section of General Overview is greyed out. I can't change where I back up my data to or manage or restore backups.
Hi nurjhan I was able to recover my playlists following a long call with Apple support. I’m still having all sorts of problems but don’t despair they might at least be able to help with that 🤞There is no point in me trying to explain how because I don’t know due to being a technophobe 🙃
Update....so I found out a few things that maybe should have been obvious, but....
I was syncing just over 200GB of pictures/videos alone, along with an additional 50GB of music. I thought I would try using iCloud for photos to get rid of 200GB worth of material on my phone and see if that sped up the process. It did, dramatically, and the progress pie chart thing goes much quicker.
As for the music and playlists, I had inadvertently signed up for Apple Music for 3 months for free when upgrading to Catalina. Unbeknownst to me, that essentially screws up (my techno terminology) any downloaded music and playlists. So, I got rid of Apple Music, synced music again, and it was all there. Also, before syncing, I read in another forum that you should exit out of iTunes so as to not duplicate anything or get redundant playlists, and that worked as well.
So, for now, all seems to be well...fingers crossed.
For what it's worth... It seems I'm experiencing the same. Both macOS and iOS are the most current. What I do is, with every cabled sync, I transfer all new pics from my iPhone to my iMac and at that time I remove all new pics from my iPhone. Then, when iTunes was around, I created a smart photo library that contained the newest 1,200 pics (or so), which would transfer back to the phone. With this, though the pics were no longer available in the camera roll, they would still be stored on the phone on the From My Mac section. Again, back with Mojave and iOS 12, the process would only sync the exceptions. It would only sync the new pics.
With the current OSs, it seems every sync process deletes all pics from the iPhone and puts them back in them from scratch. Though the Finder gives you an idea of this with the pie chart, if you go to Photos on the iPhone and scroll down to Media Types, you'll see the counts going down and then going up. By the time the Finder shows the pie chart complete, the count on the iPhone is still going up.
This takes too long, but it is what I'm seeing.
I've already sent a note to Apple using the Feedback Assistant.
I've noticed that most comments here only mention music, not photos, so it may be that my sync style only aggravates my case. But I'm just trying to explain where the slowness may come from.
Catalina - iPhone sync issues
