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

I used to think I had a job and/or a life, but really it is all about fixing bugs on computers. So, first, the simple one. Spent an hour or so with audible.com and they managed to authorize my computer so it would put audible books on my phone. Then I did a reboot and it wiped out the authorization. Had to do it all again, but at least now I know.

The rest of my day was spent with an apple senior support person. Rather than use my 22,000+ photos and take 4.5 hours for a sync, I set up a test folder with about 5,000 photos in it. synced that a couple of times. Last one was 13 minutes. Then we ran diagnostics on both the iPhone and the iMac when I was doing a sync. The senior support guy has all the logs now and will give them to engineering. He agrees with me that it should not take hours. I did have to fess up that this problem has been going on with me for 6 months pre-Catalina. Anyway, we'll see what happens.

I see that I am lucky in the sense that both my iMac and my iPhone XS are still under AppleCare so I get to talk endlessly for hours to senior support staff, but I also get to give them real diagnostics as opposed to just complaints. However, the more complaints the better. My guy said he hadn't seen complaints about slow sync. Show him! Steve

It helps me not to go mad, to find some people here from the slow sync discussion 6 months ago!

Situation is for me that if I only sync images in photo app it works.....but this is no way for me....I have to sync fotos from normal MacOS diretories....and have to wait for hours....

I just noticed that there is another thread dealing with the same issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250716707

Just thought I’d make everyone aware.

I will also provide Apple Support with links to both threads in my daily problem reports

Just to make sure they can’t say they were not aware

Yeah it’s crazy that you can rebuild an entire cache an re sync 10000 photos in less time than you can add one photo and sync it. I wonder if Apple are making it unreliable deliberately to try and get more people to get frustrated and end up using the iCloud Photo Library???

I would really appreciate if someone could post here where I can find the cache. If I select to sync from Folders on my HardDrive (instead of the Photos App) I know that a cache File is created (something starting with pod) in the Folder which I sync. But if I select the Photo App to sync from I do not know where to find it.

I tried that, but when I let it rebuild, a lot of the older photos (taken with the original iPhone) get their thumbnails created as just a black box. I'm now forced to sync 1 additional folder at a time, and with each one added, the sync time gets slower and slower. Worse, this is all happening syncing to an iPad, so when I eventually sync my iPhone, I don't know if the cache will need to be rebuilt for the different screen size.

How did you rebuild and sync as two separate steps? (As for mine, after about 9k photos in 25 folders done mostly 1 folder at a time, the next one (first in the list with over 1000 photos) had black in half of the images. I gave up, removed all photos from the iPad, and after I reboot, I'm deleting my cache and restoring from Time Machine from before this mess started (because at least the sync last week to my phone worked, which is more important since it's the only device i HAVE to sync for music). I'd restore Mojave, but I just upgraded Reminders so I can't go back.

Hi all

in this location: /Users/xxxxx/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/iPod Photo Cache/ I found this file: Photo Database

This is its content (replaced my username with xxxx):

The default interactive shell is now zsh.

To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`.

For more details, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050.

/Users/xxxxx/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/iPod\ Photo\ Cache/Photo\ Database ; exit;

xxxxs-iMac:~ xxxx$ /Users/xxxx/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/iPod\ Photo\ Cache/Photo\ Database ; exit;

-bash: /Users/xxxx/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/iPod Photo Cache/Photo Database: cannot execute binary file

logout

Saving session...

...copying shared history...

...saving history...truncating history files...

...completed.

Deleting expired sessions...30 completed.

[Process completed]

Could someone check if you have the same?

Anyone know what it means? The link suggest to change the interactive shell, but I am hesitant to do so.

When I look at it, it looks like a database (it's a list of the full path to all the processed images plus binary data); yours looks like the output of some script that ran (which might be useful to know what it was). As for the bash to zsh update notice, that's something standard any time you open Terminal in Catalina, unless you change the default shell or tell the Mac to stop showing that message. (I haven't updated yet, partly because I've been busy with the photo cache issues.)

Hi George_S3, I am (as are some others) experiencing thumbnail corruption like that described in thread In the Photos app in Catalina, the thumbprints of some photos are broken at most magnifications. That seems different from the corruption you are experiencing, as my images appear to be "smeared" rather than black.