Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Absolutely spot-on, 'TheDarkKn1ght'.

Endless glitches in the OS, serious downgrades in their core software, (especially Keynote), and no real improvements to speak of. I have said consistently for years that they have lost their focus, preferring to pander to those who use their 'toys', (e.g. iWatch, etc.), rather than improving the experience of those who helped get them where they are. i.e. Serious computer users who spend serious money on their hardware.

And never, ever, any kind of apology to those of us whose work and businesses they have harmed through their carelessness.

Appalling!

On a whim, I moved some (17) of my albums that were in a folder out of the folder and directly underneath My Albums and tried to sync the iMac Photos to my iPhone. I went to Finder, checked off all the albums I had moved and clicked on Apply. Since I have not located where you can actually see what it is doing, i just watch the spinning arrow and then the filling of he circle. When finished, it showed the eject button. When I checked my phone, it had not brought over any of the albums I checked but when I looked back at Finder on my computer which was still open, the circle was again filling. This time when finished, all of the albums I have checked were on my phone. My thinking is that the first sync was the actual backing up of the phone which is how it worked when using iTunes.

Now I know that this procedure had worked for someone else on this board and then the next time they tried it, it again removed albums and didn't put them back. While I have more albums that I would like on my phone, I'm not so anxious to see it malfunction again and be left with none.

I am running the most current version of Catalina but have not done the most recent update, 13.2.3, to my phone.

Patti - I think the first part of the "rotating sync" in the finder sidebar in the process is the backup to your Mac - I've noticed it then gives you option to eject, but quickly it starts the second part of the process - the actually syncing of new data - from what I can tell - I could be wrong or might have missed what you were describing. I have had a similar experience. When I last tried the syncing (after moving albums out from under Folders to directly under My Albums) it was a month or so ago - and while it worked, it was painfully slow (hours long and it isn't practical for my photo organizational setup). Also after it successfully synced the album to my iPad Pro, the next time I added a single image to that album, it needed several hours to sync it all again (about 700 images) - so it was just too slow to be practical and appeared to be attempting to sync it all as if for the first time - and I have taken a break from any syncing of albums waiting for the actual fix. But this was before the recent updates.

Thanks for your response.

Yes, I assumed the same with what seems to be a double syncing; first is the backup and the second the actual transfer of photos. Mine didn't take hours but I was only trying a few albums and like you, I have my albums filed by year in that specific folder. I have gone through and renamed all my albums so that the year is the first part of the name, just in case I do need to move them. It boggles the mind that Apple would have Photos set up to even make folders if you couldn't sync from them.

Just going backwards in their development.

Well, after a month and a half from my initial complaint to apple, escalation, screen sharing and log reporting, I rang back to find out what on earth was happening with my case.

All I got was an official recognition of the issue from the level 2 tech, with confirmation Apple were working on a fix, but zero idea of a release date of it.

Now, does anybody have any ideas as to how I unsubscribe from this thread, as I am well aware of the workarounds, but not interested, and to be blunt, I’m sick of this filling up my inbox now I know Apple officially don’t care about their end users.

You can unfollow this thread on top of the page or click on your profile icon -> my subscriptions

Today I talked with the german tech support, they did not hear about this issue aswell. The operator took his time to investigate, at least the call lasts for one hour. I still have faith that apple will release a fix before hl3 😩

I keep the notifications on for this thread on, as we use to say in germany "Geteiltes Leid, ist halbes Leid"

I'm getting the same issue. The only thing I can add is that my Photos Library is on an external hard drive, but that doesn't seem to make a difference based on the other comments I've seen here.

It seems that lately Apple has lost focus on having platforms that actually work the way we want them to. I'm adding this to the list of reasons to leave Apple products.

Well, after much anger and frustration i took drastic measures and reverted back to macOS Mojave, which still has similar issues.

The final straw for me was finding out that Catalina had renamed all my master photos within the Photos.library container file. - yes all 249,000 photos and videos were already perfectly named YYYY-MM-DD_HH_MM_SS.jpg for example, Y = year, M= month etc - and Catalina in it's wisdom decided to change them all and mix them up into random directories. According to other links on here the only way to get the originals back is to export from within Photos.app. - so not sure if this is a problem for any of you as well.

However at the end of the day, my problem still existed for the syncing of albums within folders. i have not tried in Mojave yet as im just finishing off the renaming/restructuring of a FRESH import all over again. Once this has been done i will let you all know.

I am hoping that by doing a clean/fresh installation of Mojave, and creating a brand new Library in the latest version, and doing a brand new import of all the content and sorting things out, this might work, but i wont be going back to Catalina anytime soon until it is sorted out. There is still no guarantee the problem is Catalina, could be iOS 13, could be a combination of both, could be the finder.app sync mechanism.. There are so many variables.

Thanks for all the useful feedback on here, i have been watching and reading, i really hope this is sorted out !

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.

Quicksilverboy -

Sharing the same frustrations, I did the same of downgrading back to Mojave. Luckily, I have a backup of the Mojave-based photo library (and iTunes library) before upgrading to Catalina, so I did not have to painstakingly rename/reorganize photos as you did. What a bummer.

However, I chose to downgrade to Mojave 10.4.3 only, as I have read this is the only reliable version before syncing problems started within Mojave (I can’t confirm this as I hesitate to update to 10.4.6 just to see if there is any difference...)

Meanwhile, I can confirm with you that on Mojave 10.4.3, the syncing problems plaguing Catalina, namely inability to sync albums nested in folders or incomplete syncs, DO NOT occur. However, with Mojave, there are other problems depending on what iOS version you are syncing with:

With devices on iOS 12, i noticed that on each new sync of introducing the slightest of changes (e.g. adding one photo in an album), iTunes will remove a small number of previously synced photos, then only to re-add them, which is fine as this is only a time issue where the complete & accurate number of photos are synced in the end.

WIth devices on IOS 13, the same problems exists (removal & re-add), but iTunes seems to remove a larger chunk of previously synced photos, only to be re-added (which is fine again, only a time issue), BUT the worst being that DUPLICATES are now created under iOS 13, inflating the photos that you intend to sync by nearly 50%. Adding insult to injury and unrelated to this thread, Album Artwork of playlists synced on iOS 13 device are also messed up. Clearly an iOS 13 issue when no such problems on iOS 12.

These observations clearly confirm that we are facing multiple issues with the Apple software ecosystem. We have iOS 13 photo syncing RECIPIENT problems with Mojave already, then we also have Catalina photo syncing SENDER problems regardless the iOS version of your device.

Wonder which problem Apple will address first, if at all.

I spent hours with Apple support including taking second by second images of the photo syncing problem discussed on this thread. Data was sent to Apple engineers but the response is - NO FIX AVAILABLE AND NO COMMITMENT OF TIME FRAME TO FIX THIS PROBLEM. This is what Apple quality and support has become - unacceptable and horrible.

Their remarks do not surprise me. Apple feels that their way is the right way no matter how it affects their customers. Here is an interesting article I read that addresses this.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2019/10/15/apple-macos-catalina-mac-imac-macbook-pro-32bit-support-microsoft-office-broken-update/#7bf37b0b7f8d

I've reinstalled Catalina over the first initial install and I did do a lot of clicking off the photos and music and books.... and synch it with nothing. Then I proceeded to synch to my Mac with backup and then I re-added all of the photos and music I wanted on my phone and it seemed to have worked. Although I only did a hand full of photo albums I am going to try to upload my entire photos library and see how that goes.

If you haven't already, maybe try reinstalling Catalina again and run a disk utilities. I had permission issues with disks, to folders, to individual files (even thought we aren't suppose to worry about those permission issues anymore) but when I checked the info window on folders, drives, files it had weird permissions listed that messed things up. I have a Mac mini 2012 with an 1TBSSD and a 1TBHD internally, and it had all these stupid permission issues until I reinstalled the OS. That could why you're having so many issues across the board. Their new security system might be screwy and needs a reinstall. I also reinstalled software that were crashing or just bounced in the dock and never launched. Now I am running fine. knock on wood.

I did all of what you suggested guided by the top level of Apple support. When it did not work, that was when he decided to record the problem second by second and sent to Apple engineering. My current work around is moving my albums out of folders. Once I did that, all the albums would sync.

my frustration is that this is a SIMPLE problem that should have been fixed easily. I guess Tharee are so many bugs with Catalina including dropping calls for iPhone 11 that this becomes a small potato. My discontent is in the lack of focus on “excellence” as this bug should not have existed to begin with. Guess I should get used to the mediocrity with Apple nowadays or move off to Android like half of my family have already done.

After 28 years on the platform) and 10s of thousands of dollars spent, I am giving serious consideration to moving on.

Currently 2 iMacs, 2 iPhones, 2 iPads, 2 Apple TVs and an Apple Watch which don't synch photos after Catalina upgrade which I was forced into because a Mojave/Photo Stream issue (purged over 600 of the photos out because of Burst Photos bug). After many hours spent with Apple Care tech the issue was eventually escalated to engineering and came back with the only solution being to upgrade to Catalina.

Moving on won't be easy but I need reliability when it comes to my music and photos — equally unhappy with iTunes and Apple Music, which I am not interested in because I simply want access to the music I own via iTunes or Ripped from CDs. Recent changes and the many problems like this are really pushing me out of the ecosystem.

So here I am, Thanksgiving with family visiting from over seas and no photos to share — thanks Apple