Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

I have the same issue. I am using OS Catalina 10.15 on my Mac and iOS 13.1.3 on my iPhone 11 Pro. I have photos which are iPhoto Events. Whenever I sync my iPhone 11 Pro in my Mac using Music app, my photos will not sync, but Music, Books etc will sync.

Update: I have just updated my iPad Pro 11 inch from padOS 13.1 and padOS 13.2. And that has fixed this issue at least . So there is one less problem going forward at least. I does appear that apple do know about these problems even though they do not publicly acknowledge them.

This is for the issue where the “Photos App” crashes on the i/padOS device when trying to use a photo in the “From My Mac” synced albums to another application like Notes, Messaging and setting wallpaper etc

Well I finally had enough and am restoring from backup to Mojave. It’s not just the photos app but quite a few others that don’t have updates to accommodate Catalina. I think I’ll leave this one behind for a long time.

I first contacted support 18 days ago. After hours of unsuccessful attempts to rectify the situation, screen captures were uploaded and sent to the engineering department last week. None of my albums will transfer whether they are in the main album directory or in a subfolder. The only things that transfer are My Photo Stream, Recents (from the past 602 days), Wallpaper, Video for Upload and 10% of the photos of one particular album that I'm not trying to sync. Just sitting here with the rest of you waiting for a response. Perhaps Apple should provide free iCloud storage until the problem is resolved.

Kathy, at this point, I am not even convinced that iCloud storage is the answer to this problem. Generally speaking, I do not like using any kind of cloud storage, whether it is Apple iCloud storage, or storage by any other online storage company. Yes, security and privacy are big issues with me. I just feel uncomfortable about storing my personal data online. There have been way too many security breaches in recent years.

A while back, I was paying a dollar a month for 50 GB of iCloud storage. However, I cancelled it, being as I wasn't really using all of that storage space.

A few days ago, right before my photos syncing broke, I disabled all of the apps in my iCloud settings in System Preferences/Internet Accounts/iCloud, except for Calendars, because I noticed that I lost a few features when I disabled the Calendar app in iCloud.

However, today I discovered that a few other things had stopped working as well when I disabled them in my iCloud settings. So I was forced to re-enable Photos, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Notes, and Find My Mac.

But here's the thing that I really wanted to mention to you. I re-enabled the Photos app in my iCloud settings, in the hope that I would be able to get all of my photos and videos from my iMac back onto my iPhone, even if regular syncing is currently not working, as we all know.

Upon enabling the Photos app again, I got a message that there was not enough space in iCloud to accommodate all of my photos and videos. So, I went ahead and repurchased the $1/month iCloud plan so I again have 50 GB of iCloud storage.

I also verified that I have "iCloud Photos" enabled on my iPhone, which now runs iOS 13.2. I also have my iPhone set to "Download and Keep Originals". The options "Upload to My Photo Stream" and "Shared Albums" are both disabled.

So even though I have the Photos app enabled in my iCloud settings on my iMac; and even though "iCloud Photos" and "Download and Keep Originals" are enabled on my iPhone; and even though I paid for the 50 GB of iCloud storage, NONE of my photos are yet appearing on my iPhone. All I see are two photos I actually took on my iPhone, and a video I shot on my iPhone a few days ago. My 21 GB of photos and videos from my iMac are nowhere to be found in the Photos app on my iPhone.

So, before you consider purchasing extra iCloud storage space, you may want to consider the above. Quite frankly, I am rather disappointed by the various bugs and incompatibilities I have encountered since upgrading to Catalina. I had none of these problems with Mojave.

Yes, photos on my iMac does not sync to my iPhone and iPad correctly.

Still. After yesterday’s 13.2 and today’s 10.15.1 update!

I talked with Apple Care a week before. They transfered me to a senior, senior told me she passed this to engineering team yada yada yada. 2 hours wasted and no solution. After all talks, they told me they aware of this issue and I should wait for an update.

I waited for a Catalina update. After 13.2 update for iOS, Catalina update 10.15.1 came today.

Still no fix. Still not syncing my photos under subfolder, just albums on main root are syncing.

Why Apple, why?

What I have told you a week ago?

Their priority is only more Emojis.

As I said.

You can create a folder to your Mac anywhere in finder.

After this you can choose the destination folder to sync and works great.

Don't waste your time to speak with any genius at Apple support who has no idea.

Until fix the issue just proceed to the above solution.

And done forget, more millions of emoji on the way.

I have the exact same problems! Apple released an iOS update today 10/29/19 to Catalina- unfortunately this update did not fix the problem.

I have also updated my iPhone 11 Pro and am running iOS 13.2 still will not sync my photo albums from my MacBook Pro to my iPhone.

I hope Apple is aware and will fix this bug please!!

I had a similar issue after updating to Catalina. The only fix I found was to delete my Photos library and rebuild it from scratch. Then it synced as expected. It was a lot of work but it did work for me.

As already mentioned in one of my previous posts: I have been on the phone on several occasions for several hours with a support engineer to explain what the issue is and try several things. Log files were collected.

Today I received a call from the engineer again. He explained that the problem is formally accepted as an issue which needs to be solved by an update of the operating system and that the developers are working on it.

The only thing which seems to work properly at this moment is to NOT synchronize from the Photo library but directly from folders on the hard drive.

For anything else we need to wait for the issue to be fixed by an update of Catalina.

I understand everyone is annoyed by this but let’s stop cluttering this discussion with negative comments as we all know them by now and they only fill people’s email. Constructive feedback appreciated.

Thanks for the update.

I have successfully moved photos from Mac to iPad using shared albums. I then save the shared photos to the iPad and create a new album. All this requires a lot of selecting each photo in turn and is very tedious. Also as far as I can tell iTunes optimised the photo sizes for the idevice. There is after all no point in putting a 20 mpx photo on a screen that has a 5 mpx display you are just using up storage space for no useful purpose but this what happens using my suggested work around and I suspect your suggestion also. So it is this optimisation process that engineers forgot when discontinuing iTunes and replacing the photo syncing process to Finder.

I have already updated the iPad to 13.2 as we speak the Mac is updating to Catalina 10.15.1 we may have to wait for 10.15.2!

Just hope it works.

I am concerned that they are trying to force us to use/pay for ICloud which I don't want to do! I am very organized with my photos and I want to control the synching and how I arrange them in albums! Very frustrating.

Well I have updated to 10.15.1 and sadly the problem still exists. I am getting some albums to sync but only some photos actually sync in each album. As far as I can tell only photos less that 5 MB sync anything larger is simply ignored.

So, I've had the same issue with my iPhone X (iOS 13.2) and my MacBook (MacOS 10.15). Until I installed MacOS 10.15.1, I was NOT able to get my albums in folders (by years) to sync. I have been noticing that it takes forever for my iPhone to sync and there really ins't any visual clues in the new OS. But, as an experiment, I had an album NOT in a folder, but directly under the My Albums folder. IT WORKED! I was able to sync the album to my iPhone. So I tried all my other ablums (both Smart Albums and regular type albums by moving them into the My Albums folder. They all sync'ed. I'm fine with this, I can rename the albums to show the year as long as I can manipulate my picture library on my MacBook. It is not perfect, but it works for me.

The icon of the empty circle fractionally getting filled caught my eye. The two arrows chasing each other in a circle is misleading. The empty circle appears to indicate that something useful is happening.

I will be happier when folders can be used again, but I sigh with relief that albums are sync'ing again.

I have mine setup as "My Albums" then about 13 folders under that. No folders within folders besides what's in "My Albums", except the photo events folder...I never created that folder, no do I use it. Since it's a folder within the album, can I delete it without impacting my library?