Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

I am having an issue with the number of photos that are syncing. All my folders have been individually imported into the photo app. Under My Albums I have all my albums with photos in each; however if I sync an album with say 1000 photos in it, only a portion of them will actually sync to my iPad or iPhone. Hundreds of hours wasted in organizing and sorting photos. It should be simple.

I have deselected the “Copy items to the Photos library” in preferences too. I don't want to have the pictures within the library. If the library is corrupt, the pictures are gone. My pictures are store in traditional finder folders. Then I sync them to my iOS devices with the option “Copy items to the Photos library” deselected. Only a preview is stored within the library. This procedure has worked fine for 9 years now, except for a sorting issue a few years ago.

Now, only a few pictures out of 6500 are synced. Videos are mostly synced. I don't use folders within photos app.

Works now - more or less

Had the same issue and kept updating macOS and iOS and kept changing Photos Album structure and synchronisation level.

Photos library includes >25.000 pics, > 1000 videos and >100 albums, folders and subfolders

Run now macOS 10.15.1 and iOS13.2 on iPhone6s (126Gbyte and still lots of free memory space)

After missing all pictures in all album subfolders on the iPhone after synchronisation and numerous try's and changes I think what worked was to deselect in /finder/Locations/iphonename/Photos 'Sync photos to your device '

and accept with synchronisation to delete all photos on the iPhone. It needed several syncs and patience until the photo library on the iPhone was finally really deleted.

Then I selected the 'Sync photos to your device', while limiting it to 'selected albums' only.

With the first sync I started with Favourites only, the started adding the next albums to come after each sync like videos, selfies...

Then I started using to include first albums, folders and subfolders. This still did not work necessarily the first time, but started to work after a few syncs.

Then I switched to sync 'All photos and albums'. Took a long time. After first sync the iPhone did show a lot of picture frames that stayed black. So it knew about the pictures, but did not seem to have a preview....

After a couple of further syncs I finally had the full library, all pictures and all videos synced with all albums, folders and subfolder structures!

However it is still not a stable solution. With next sync there are suddenly 6000 pictures missing again. After importing one new picture from the iPhone to make it force to synchronise and a new long resync they are all back again.

So it does work from time to time, but is still not stable.

From my perspective this has nothing to do with iCloud or local sync. This only has to do with software quality and the prioritisation of bug fixes.

Synchronising a list of pictures is not rocket science. It does not require artificial intelligence nor quantum computing. This did work fine already 5 years ago. It also does not need a lot of processing power.

My guess is that the company spends much efforts in new features like face recognition and creating moments for you that might not be needed by every body, while loosing the quality and stability of must have basic features.

All the automatic picture processing in the background for these features takes tremendous processing power and still offers only limited results. Thats why I keep doing the face recognition and creating 'moments' (album/folder/subfolder) by myself.

With this unstable synchronisation of deleting and resending thousands of pictures the phone keeps rescanning the same pictures for face recognition again and again and synchronisation takes forever.

So while we hope for a new release to get basic features back to work, lets hope no other working features get corrupted.

Back to future

Then I startet with 'Se

To the one that worry about the photos library could go corrupt and to loose many or all pictures.

Besides running regular backup with time machine it is additional safety to just make a copy of your library

/user/pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary to any external hard disk.

I've been following this thread since Catalina was released. I too started having syncing issues after IOS 13 (before Catalina)when syncing started taking an unusually long time. It appeared then, if I recall correctly, as all the photos selected from the library being synced back into the phone. I have 230000 pictures and this would take over an hour to sync. Then after Catalina was installed, some major problems started to show up that have never been an issue before. This is happening with a iphone 11 pro max. The only photos that synced were those under "My albums" . I chose to sync all photos and videos and that seemed to copy all the photos back to my phone. The next time I synced, with some new photos added to the library, the sync started to duplicate most of all photos, taking nearly two hours to complete. I then attempted to remove all the photos my deselecting "all photos" . The result removed the copies but didn't remove all the photos. I had to repeat this five times before all the photos were removed. Photos syncing is obviously broken for some as I have not seen any news on the tech sites, etc. I do not use cloud for storage of my photo library.

Here's something interesting.

I just did a Sync with my old iPhone 6+ (that I basically use as an iPod now) and it took all of my pictures & videos over from the Photos app.

MacOS 10.15.1

iOS 12.4.1

So in my opinion (for what that's worth), it might be an iOS 13 issue and not a Catalina issue.

I hope folks on this thread find this new information helpful.

Cheers

Thanks 86mustang,

i thought the same thing this morning about whether it is an iOS 13 problem? ! i really hope its a problem with iOS rather than Catalina, as already, Catalina is having so many other drama's. I also wonder why so many others are not complaining about the same thing (like this should be a huge uproar), but perhaps its because people have not updated iOS yet OR they are are using iCloud as their storage...

I read online that iOS 13.3 was released to developers today ( which i have installed ) but will need to try this when i get home. I dont really want to revert backwards for iOS as i dont think this can be done on iPhone 11 Max Pro etc. ! but anyway interesting feedback from you thank you for sharing that

Always happy to help, like so many others in this thread have.

The "Photos From My Mac" is there on my ip6+ running iOS 12.4.1.

I selected Sync ALL PHOTOS vs selecting certain albums, so I might try that next to see what happens.

OK, here is another update:

MacOS 10.15.1

iOS 13.2 on an iP11

Instead of selecting certain albums, I decided to sync ALL PHOTOS. IT WORKED!

The "Photos From My Mac" is there on my ip11 running iOS 13.2

It's worth noting, I did NOT make any changes to the Photos App, iPhone or iMac.

Not sure why it worked this time, but I'll take it...until Apple fixes the bug.

Good Luck everyone.

Thanks for the update 86mustang. I was aware that it's possible to sync the whole lot, but i have 2.4tb of photos and video and a 256gb iPhone XS. i just ordered the iPhone 11 Pro 512 but even then, not enough unless it compresses it... etc.. but at the end of the day, the functionality is there to be able to select folders and sync etc. I agree with other post'ers that there have been numerous issues with syncing for a while

1) current issue of no albums being sync'd when they are within a folder

2) the removal of ALL the photos and RE-ADDING them when you sync... (i.e i can sync 4 albums, and when i go to add more, the 4 albums are removed and then added again)

3) If i import RAW photos which are approx 30mb each, i can not sync these to teh device until a) the next day, b) i have imported new content to update the directory. - what a mess.

So, i will try iOS 13.3 when i get home. If this does not work i may invest time into rebuilding my library, by hosting the pictures outside the photos.library and importing them without "copying to library". i know this has not worked for others, but for me, i would like a bit more control over what is going on within the Library.

Just an update with my previous post..

I upgraded to iOS 13.3 but sadly this didn't make a difference. It's very hard to determine what the cause of this is.

I did one small test where I created a test photos.library, and when importing some photos decided to leave the photos in their original place (not copy to library). Sync'ing works no problem when I select from FOLDER rather than the library. in fact the folder option is really quick and does not skip files like Photos.app has done for a long time. Especially large files like "RAW, CR2, DNG" etc. - Every time I have imported those types of files, only a few files will transfer.... but the next day, once the date changes over, and I import more files, this seems to PUSH the rest of the files over to the device. A bit a of a side story, but it does solve that issue for me. Unfortunately the folders option isn't ideal due to time zone/travel issues where it throws the pictures out of order.

im so depressed all this hard work and nothing!. so not sure if its iOS or Catalina or both!....

Also, I did a Clean wipe/install not iOS 13.2 and upgraded to 13.3... so ... it did not work :( !

Glad that worked for you but for most of us, it doesn't. I have too many photos to have them all on my phone (Xs) or iPad and they are all organized in folders/albums. Based on all the comments, this certainly appears to be a glitch with Catalina.

Thank you John. I suggested it had to be a bug too, somewhere above in this discussion. It's not easy to call up support from Italy (that's where I live), but I already reported the bug on the feedback site, and I think I'm going to report it again every now and then, just to remind them...

Besides... I'm reporting on other two issues as well: 1) column browser missing on Music app, 2) Apple Remote app not working after Catalina update. Did anyone else in this discussion also detect these issues?

I confirm the not longer working iTunes Remote. What you mean with column browser I don't understand.

Also strange sync behavior of Albums to iPhone X 13.2 where some Albums with correct artwork appear a 2nd time but without artwork. But do not let us mixup bug there.

What is also strange in Photos that some "Persons" appear double or three time on the mobile. In Photos at the Mac they are correct, beside that a differenr key picture of the person between Mac and Phone is displayed.

It's horrible at the moment because I use my iEnviromment mostly for Audio and Video playing and syncing between several iDevices and streaming to AirPorts which worked like a charm before iOS13 shuffled my playlists and Catalina the pictures.

Thanks! Reported in both links. Have you reported in a similar way for iOS too? Below, for interest, is the content of my bug reports.

"Since instaling Catalina and iOS 13, the syncing of photos directly over WiFi/USB between my iPad Pro, iPhone X and MacBook Pro is very unreliable. Adding one photo seems to cause excessive sync times and frequently the iOS devices get duplicates, blank photos, or no albums at all. I have been syncing my Smart Albums on MacOS Photos to my i-devices for many years and only now has it broken. This has caused me a HUGE amount of time and effort. Please fix.

Also - now that direct syncing is controlled via Finder, we have lost the ability to see the status of what is going on whilst the sync is taking place. This is VERY un-user-friendly. Why???"

CB