Very slow first iPhone and iPad photo sync over usb-a with Catalina

The Photos app provides some in-built "containers", such as "My Albums" and "My Projects". I haven't used "My Projects" much so I won't say more about it. "My Albums" can contain any mix of albums and folders. A folder, too, can contain any mix of albums and folders. An album behaves as if it contains photos (I'll use the word photos to mean photos and/or movies), but it doesn't really contain them. What I mean by this is that a photo can appear in 0 albums or in 1 album or in multiple albums. For example, if I went on a walking holiday in Iceland with some friends, then I could make the photos from that holiday appear in albums called "Iceland" and "Walking" and "Friends & Family" and "Nature". An album can be a regular album or a smart album. To place some photos in a regular album, one drags them to that album. To place some photos in a smart album one creates a rule (or a set of rules) which cause those photos to appear in that smart album. Each album has a Key Photo, which "represents" that album visually. For event-based photos, I place up to four albums in a folder and then place that folder in a folder representing a year. For example:

Okay. I did a sync last night after having done the initial one the night before. This time it only took 4.5 hours even though it didn't have anything to do. I guess I'll spend my morning on the phone with apple if I can get through. It also didn't put my audible.com books on my iPhoneXS. I just spent an hour on chat with audible.com and I think they fixed the problem, I just don't have 4.5 hours to check it now. I'll sync again tonight to see if the books go on.

Just to keep everyone up to date on what is happening with me/apple, I discovered something new today. It happened several times but I didn't understand what was happening. Now I think I do.

I used a small, 5K, set of photos to work with apple to figure out what was going on. Tonight when I wanted to put my 22K+ back on, I plugged the phone in, clicked on it in Finder, went to photos, and choose the folder with my photos in it.

What happened next is the surprise. Finder's CPU usage shot up to 100% and Finder froze for all other uses. It was still functioning, but it was clearly just too busy checking out my photos to bother with anything else. (For what it is worth, I had just rebooted.) Since I wanted my photos on and I am going to bed, I went ahead and synced (it wasn't so frozen it wouldn't let me do that). I know this will take 5 hours or so. I also see that Finder is still frozen and is running at 100% CPU. I hadn't noticed this the last two nights when I synced because I just synced and went to bed.

One more, but related, bad thing, to work with them on.

Steve

Scream! The continuing saga. 6 hours to put the photos back on over night, but what I feared happened. The reboot last night de-authorized my computer for using audible.com books, so the 6 hour sync took all my books off. Since the main use of my iPhoneXS is to listen to audible.com books, I had to get them back on. I managed to re-authorize my computer, but couldn't take 4 or 5 hours to sync to get the back on. So, I had to delete all 22K+ photos so I could do a quick sync to get them on. Okay, did that. Have my books back but no photos.

I should point out that Finder was still frozen this morning after the sync, but I didn't have to reboot, it was enough to force quit Finder. It comes back up functional. By the way, it doesn't say it isn't responding in the activity monitor, it just isn't responding.

One more issue. When the reboot de-authorizes the computer, I can't tell it. I can still play a book on the computer. They just won't sync. In principle, you can't play the book on the computer unless it is authorized. Since it wouldn't sync, the "solution" is to de-authorize it on my own and then try to play a book. Then the option of authorizing it comes up. Then I can sync. All a bloody nuisance.

...and it looks like iPod Photo Cache is excluded from Time Machine backups, so I guess I'm not looking at my photos on my large iPad anymore, just my iPhone. I'd say I'll wait for Apple to fix it, but it's been slow for over half a year, and I seem to be the only one reporting corrupted thumbnails (yes, I submitted feedback).

Same problems since iTunes March 2019. The workaround until Catalina was the old copy of iTunes 12.9.2.5. Now I have to clear iPod photo cache every time before syncing. This works fine, about 30 minutes for 6.000 photos. Hope for soon bugfix!!!

@George_S3: I deleted the iPod Sync cache in the hope that after that syncing would start “normally” again. That was not the case, the issue remains as described by many: only Albums which are directly under “My Albums” and even from there extremely large pictures are not synced either.

However, after that I found that file, I had not executed any particular script. So it must have been created by the Finder Sync process. One could suspect, that the message points to the fact that Finder will only work with “zsh” as the default shell (mine is still set to “bash”, I do not understand why the Catalina installation process did not set it to “zsh” if that is required for Catalina).

If you open the link to the support article, you are told how to change the standard shell to “zsh”. Given the warning message when you go there, I am hesitant to do so myself.

I spent some time in a support chat again yesterday. The person believed it is a system error and wanted to pass me on to the next level support by phone. I ran out of time so will make the call today.

I just had a long call with 2nd level support of Apple. I have taken him thru all examples of what works and what not (at least on my PC. He confirmed, that this case will be escalated to engineering. I will get a callback on Friday morning.

Will keep everyone posted.

Definitely not solved! Hope someone can click a not solved button. Nice that I'm not alone in this.

As often mentioned, these problems started back in Feb/Mar sometime. I worked with senior level support at Apple for months, but my guy was away from time to time and so was I. With Catalina we can start fresh (although I still have my old case ID). They can't say "wait until Catalina fixes everything" anymore.

Anyway, I have a new senior level guy working with me now. On Monday we ran a sync with just 5,000 photos (only 15 minutes, it isn't linear, my 22,000 photos takes 6 hours.) (For the technical guys out there, the 5,000 photos had already been synced to the iPhone XS. In principle, the sync didn't have anything to do, but still took 15 minutes. Back in the good old days when Apple software worked, it could add 50 photos to the 22,000 in just a couple of minutes.) I had my photo folders on my iMac OS partition and the phone was plugged in directly. He ran a bunch of diagnostics and collected log files for when the sync was running. He has passed all that stuff on to the engineers. In the past, this has often led to "we didn't get the right log files and/or diagnostics." Hoping this gives them what they need to find the problem.

AppleCare is only good for 3 years, and this problem has already used up 7 months of my AppleCare. I think they should extend the AppleCare when this sort of thing happens.

I will post when I hear back from my senior support guy.

Just to keep everyone updated, yesterday I updated my iPhone to iOS 13.1.3 via OTA as I was still having frequent Bluetooth disconnections in my car. With minor version updates it’s usually quite fast (like within 10mins max after it starts) but this took an unusually long time of approx 30mins!

Anyway, my point is that I got a shock when I went into my photos app approx 1hr after it restarted and found that all my synced albums have disappeared again!!! Most of the photos could still be found outside of the albums though. However, since I was out and about from morning till night yesterday, I had no choice but to leave it alone till I got home. Strangely, by mid afternoon, some of the photos in some of the albums started to appear. Unfortunately, it was still incomplete and a mess by the time I got home at night so I tried the following steps this time round:

• uncheck synching of photos (this led finder in Catalina to prompt for either keeping or removal of synced photos in my phone which I confirmed)
• recheck syncing of photos and try but this finished in a jiffy and so obviously didn’t work
• redo step 1
• remove the iPod cache folder
• recheck syncing of photos

Some strange things are definitely going on here. I’m just dreading the next time my albums disappearing again at the next iOS update.