Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

I also reported the problem to both links but forgot to mention not being able to see the status although I did tell that to the tech support person I had spoken to.

I know that some found that moving the albums out of folders to directly under the My Albums worked but that then gives more issues. I would have to rename each album so I would know what year the albums belongs to.

Patti

• Just updated to iOS 13.2.2 as advised by my Apple Consultant - nothing

It 100% will not sync albums that are located within a folder as opposed to albums being located in the root of the organisational structure

Apple need to work on this...

Posted early on and have been reading most our messages.

Has anyone been able to confirm if the issue is with Catalina or iOS 13? Did anyone try iOS 12 or 11 on Catalina?

For me, I spent the last two weeks starting from scratch: reinstalled Mojave 10.14.3 with iTunes 12.9.2.5 on an external bootable drive, and rebuilding the photos library there, album by album, via airdropping albums from Catalina on my MBP to Mojave on the external drive connected to my iMac. Finished last night, and will clone the external drive back to my MBP.

I absolutely will not upgrade to Catalina again, or even Mojave 10.14.6 or a newer iTunes version, until there is confirmation the bug is fixed.

However, I worry the issue lies now on iOS 13.....

the conundrum....

SUCCESS! I posted earlier about having the same issue of not being able to sync photos from my MacBook Pro to my iPhone since upgrading to Catalina. Unlike many others though, I was not able to sync albums whether in or out of a subfolder. I have had no photos on my iPhone for the past month with the exception of Recents and Camera Roll. Two days ago, after downloading 10.15.1 for my Mac and iOS 13.2.2 for my phone, I once again attempted to Sync Selected albums and chose a single album above the subfolder line, then a single album under the subfolder and finally selected Sync All Photos and Albums. Once again I was disappointed to see that they didn't sync. I opened up Photos on my phone today and my albums are back! I usually have separate albums dedicated to synching to my iPhone as I don't need to hold the entire 41,000/106GB library but I'm not touching anything for now. Fingers crossed there is now a solution or it will coming soon for everyone.

For what it's worth, I'm sitting here running Catalina 10.15.1 sync my 11" iPadPro and iPhone Xs at the same time. If you put the iOS photo browsers in "All Photos" and scroll to the bottom, I can see "xxx Photos, xxx Videos" and "Syncing..." If I compare those two xxx values with the Photos app, I can see both iDevices slowly creeping up to parity with the MacOS library.And every minute or two you can see the thumbnails dynamically update as the data comes in.

But I'm plugged in the whole time this is going on and the Finder is giving me no indication that it's doing any syncing at all. In fact both iDevice icons in the sidebar are only showing the eject icon...no preparing to sync or active syncing feedback of any sort.

Further, my iPadPro seems to have stopped at 20,698 photos and 173 videos, as my iPhone continues to climb past both those numbers on the way to 21,858 and 192 respectively.

So it appears that syncing does work while the devices are plugged in, but there's no visible clue in the Finder. And then there's the iPad issue stopping.

Maybe this will be of help to everyone out there. And for just FYI, my library has nested folders...everything seems to be working.

Um, and now my phone has stopped short of the goal. Hmmm....

FWIW (not much) I was just at an Apple Store having a genius look at an issue with my iPhone. I told her about the photo synching problems and the two threads I am following. She said that they have a lot of customers coming in and complaining about these photo (and other) issues and that she agrees that Apple did not do a good job with Catalina regarding this.

I can't speak to the use of the Photos app, but had a very similar sync issue with Mojave, had to install an older version of iTunes in order to sync properly (earlier this year). My point is, the issues goes back several months (in my experience).

My thread here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250716061

refers back to that issue as well.

Well as much as I enjoy my inbox being filled up with this discussion I hope that everyone has taken to leave feedback and leave a bug report as John Duffy1 suggested earlier. That's really the only way Apple will see the issue.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

After grappling with this issue for some time and not yet finding a resolution, I thought I’d summarise my observations:

• The problem existed in Mojave. I first noticed after updating my iPad and iPhone to iOS 13 that the sync process no longer skipped unchanged albums, but seemed to take ages and interfere with everything, leading to the symptoms described below.
• It isn’t limited to albums within folders. My top level albums do not sync properly.
• As pointed out by a couple of other folk, the usual failure symptoms I see are some duplicate photos, where one of each pair has location info and the other doesn’t.
• The only way I have found to recover the situation is to deselect albums to sync and then reselect. Or to globally deselect syncing of photos and re-enable.
• The latter only works reliably with my iPad, not my iPhone. This evidence may be invalid due to a small sample of tests, or it may point to logic which differs between iOS and iPadOS. Or it may be due to a performance-related race condition in the logic. My iPad Pro takes significantly less time to sync (well or badly) than my iPhone X.
• The Finder pie charts seem to relate to the sync stages previously elaborated in iTunes - Backup, Syncing Content, following on after each other without being labelled.
• A repair of the MacOS Photos library didn’t help.
• The Finder sync panel can sometimes forget state, requiring a MacOS restart or Finder relaunch. Sometimes an iOS device reset is also required.
• The whole process is unreliable regardless of WiFi or USB connectivity for sync.
• It would be great (even as a workaround) to be able to retain certain albums on the iOS devices whilst excluding them from the sync process - it’s annoying that multiple albums get corrupted and need to be restored after virtually every sync.
• Regarding the sync process ‘interfering’ with all albums regardless of whether their contents have changed - I wonder if this could perhaps be due to logic which trawls for the purpose of face recognition or similar...

In short, very frustrating and time consuming. Not rocket surgery in this day and age. Should be the sort of core bread and butter functionality that is included in Apple’s regression testing. I do think it will be fixed, but it really should never have been broken in the first place.

What on earth were Apple thinking when faced with the strategic need to rehome the sync process from iTunes to Finder? The sensible engineer would have surely thought... “Syncing logic is complex. Let’s make the first step to retain the well-tested logic and constrain changes to the user interface only.”

CB

Any official response from Apple on when they might fix this.........

The issue is certainly with sub folders. People photos sync fine, "all photo albums" sync fine. But "selected albums" they are in sub folders done sync.

My photos are not in folders or sub folders and they do not sync, so this is not just limited to those who organise their photos in this way.

This is issue also predates Catalina and Mojave, although we have had sporadic fixes.

In my household it affects all iOS devices of all ages.

This is just one of many problems caused by Catalina. I never had this issue with Photos running in previous version of the operating system. It all starting with Catalina.

It is beyond belief that Apple would put out software that would not interact with their own software i.e. Photos and their own devices. I also believe that it is a mistake on Apple's part not to monitor these community boards.

I have written Apple on more than one occasion and have spent time on the phone with tech support. Depending on who you get on the phone, they either are aware of the issue or have no idea.

Keeping my fingers crossed for a solution to this issue soon.

Well, really the only way to get a response that will do anything is to sign up for the free level of developer on the apple site and submit bug reports through the dev site and feedback app - I get responses from the right folks (I think) when doing that. Just have to be very clear and objective in the reporting and they will look into it. Its odd, but I don't think these forums are monitored at all

Given that we are told different things depending on who at Apple you speak to, we just don't know if that's true. I have been advised by a senior Photos tech that it is a known issue and being addressed. Other techs had me doing silly things like starting in safe mode to try to fix it. Having said that, there have been a number of baffling and stupid changes in the Catalina OS which serve no one, so who knows. Apple seem to be making "improvements" which do the opposite (see MacBook keyboard issues, for reference).

apparently Apple Releases macOS Catalina 10.15.2..

I wonder if this may fix the issues we are having? (again, reminding that this thread is in regards to Albums located in Folders, are not being sync'd. i ended up going back to Mojave, which has taken me weeks to do so, but if any of you wanted to see if the update fixes things? Interestingly though, the keyword below "newly" created folders, so probably getting hopes up on this one. Funny thing, i don't recall anyone complaining about these issues below, yet, they are fixed ?