Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

I also replied to the message with many questions, although I don't see my response. Hopefully, one of us or both with hear back. If using iCloud, are we actually seeing a link to the Folders/Albums in the cloud or are the pictures actually on our devices. This would lead me to more questions. First, if we are in an area that does not have wifi or good cell service, are our pictures not available? Also, if it actually is loading our pictures on our devices, can we pick & choose which albums we want? I don't want all of my albums on my devices.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly and I do understand that you wrote what is now working for you. I have read the instructions on iCloud photos, partially confirming what I already knew that it is all photos that upload to iCloud. I was mainly curious if you were able to set up the Folders/Album in iCloud or if iCloud uploading them that way from your computer. I have been told on more than one occasions that iCloud simply uploads all photos and there is no folder/album order. Of course, like everything else when talking to Apple, it depends on who you talk to.

Re My Photo Stream - in the past, if you chose to use iCloud photos, you would not have My Photo Stream.

I currently have 25,000+ photos on my iMAC and this is after eliminating about 8 years of photos which I have stored on an external drive.

Guess I have more research to do.

Thanks again.

Thanks both.

So backwards can't choose whats visible on different devices but once again we can't change that (Only Apple) so won't moan.

My biggest fear is loosing data if the worst happens. Currently i maintain photos in the photos app on mac. I copy and past the photo library icon to a hard drive so i have it backed up if mac was stolen etc etc. If its all on icloud, is there the "icon" ("folder") that i can opy and paste onto a hard drive for my sanity?

I'm assuming that your Synology unit is older as I couldn't find it on their website. I also could not find any pricing. If this unit is connected to your network, does that not mean that your network has to be available at all times? For me, I know that would not work. I travel a great deal and if I am going to gone for a couple of weeks or more, I shut down everything at home.

Also, is Photo Station a program that is downloaded to your unit from Synology directly?

You’re welcome.

No fear, you will not lose anything. Your photo library with same icon and everything remains the same if you choose ‘Download Originals to this Mac’ in Photos app iCloud preferences. And then you can copy, backup, whatever you want, wherever you want. It’s same as before you switch iCloud Photos.

Correct, my Synology unit is about 4 years old and likely disconnected.

Something like this might be a good unit, DS718+ , https://www.synology.com/en-us/solution/photographer https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1364345-REG/synology_ds718_diskstation_2_bay_nas.html

My Synology box is hanging off my my network and available inside & outside of my home, so yes, the network does need to be available, however, Synology allows the unit to go into sleep mode so the drives are not constantly spinning and it wakes on network access/request.

Photo Station is one of the many apps Synology offers, as well as back-up apps, music, mail, etc. Personally for the way I work, it's perfect for my needs and I understand that it may not suit everyone's needs or target price, so I was just tossing it out there as an alternative for folks to explore.

I hope that helps.

Thanks for sharing this.

I'm still inclined to give Apple the benefit of the doubt regarding this issue. I don't believe Apple would make the effort to move Photos sync from iTunes to the Finder in Catalina if they wanted it to not work and force customers to use only iCloud to access their photos on their iOS devices. Apple must know that it looks bad for them to release something that fails to live up to the Steve Jobs quote "it just works". Instead they would have announced that iOS devices will now only access photos that users upload to their iCloud account.

I suspect that Catalina was released prematurely to meet a corporate mandated release schedule. By prematurely I mean that Catalina was not sufficiently tested with bugs fixed prior to release.

I am going to be patient for now and hope for a Catalina fix for this issue to be released soon.

I actually tried iCloud photos about 3 1/2 years ago and was disappointed that the sequence of photos in my albums was scrambled. I then cancelled the extra storage in my iCloud account and turned off iCloud photos. Maybe that has been fixed now.

BTW, Catalina Home Sharing of my Photos library with the latest Apple TV tvOS works with all of my nested folders organization accessible on my Apple TV. The only gripe I have here is that I must share all of my photos instead of selected albums. I also hope this will be fixed in Catalina soon.

I would tend to agree that this isn't Apple trying to shake us down for more money. My original post to this board misunderstood the original problem...but I was also seeing syncing issues. I believe I started syncing my entire photo library to my iPhone and iPad Pro only in the past year because I was able to afford the space to do so. But from the very beginning, pre-Catalina, my folders disappeared. To be clear, all my photo albums copied over, but the enclosing folder hierarchy evaporated.

Since I was an Aperture migrant, all my folders were inside the iPhoto Albums folder (or something like that). And then they were broken down my year (e.g. 2017), and then in each year's folder were albums. In rare cases did I go one more level deep in folders. When they sync, they'e loaded onto the iDevice in the order they appear in the left-hand nav bar in Photos. Fortunately for me, I prefaced the name of each of my albums with the year (e.g. 2017 | Barcelona). But with up to 15 albums in each year going back to 1967, I have a lot of scrolling to do on my iDevice to get to those early years.

In retrospect, this is a bug, right? But it happened this way before Catalina. I know smart albums have never copied over, though I must say with the computing power on our iDevices these days I don't understand why not.

If turning on iCloud Photo sync brings me that folder structure to my iDevices, I just may do that. But that makes it even more apparent that losing that structure syncing over a wire has got to be a bug...one that goes back at least to the previous macOS/iOS versions if not further back.

Add me to the list! Ever since the Catalina update, photo syncing to my Xs has been a mess. Not only does each sync take forever, but with every incremental sync, I'm having duplicates and triplicates or random photos appearing. Hours with apple phone support as well as time at the 'genius' bar has done nothing. I've tried repairing libraries. I've changed folder structures. I've done a full factory reset of the phone and done all of the restore manually to ensure no bad libraries are pulled from a backup. Nothing works. It's hugely frustrating. I consider the Photos update to be a real bust if I cannot sync to my phone.

I have recently upgraded to 10.15.2 (public version)

Same issue : nested photo albums don't sync with iOS.

Any hint / workaround ?

This is terribly annoying ! Any decent Photo library needs some structuring

and questioning Apple's quality process.

If you don’t mind favoriting all the photos you like within the nested albums (either all or some) and then sync the favorites folder, that worked for me. All my favorites synced to my phone in they actual nested albums. I just favorited several photos from each album not the whole albums. I synced 700 favorites photos and it worked.

hope this makes sense for some.

Unfortunately such workarounds have not worked for me. In my sync issue, I tried to fix things by creating a single smart folder with all my photos. Didn’t help my problem.

There could be a photo quality issue at play. You’re only syncing 700 favorites which is a really small number. I’m trying for 35,000.

I imagine those who have created nested folder setups to organize have similarly large numbers.

It really doesn’t seem like it should be hard to get a simple 1-1 relationship copied between devices, but clearly that’s not the case.

I would never have purchased a 256g unit if I’d known I wouldn’t be able to copy my photos (largest use of space) to my device as I want.

Although was never an Aperture user, I also had my albums filed in folders for each year. When Photos came into existence, Apple stopped using Photo Events, which is what my folders were listed under, but copies my folders into Photos under the folder Photo Events. While folders themselves never transferred to my iPhone or iPad, I could check off which of my albums I wanted from each folder and they would sync to my devices. and they would be in the same order as listed in the folder.

The fact that this no longer happens and photos albums are being deleted from my devices even though Finder allows you to select them from their nesting folder, is a glitch with Catalina.

I was able to get some of my albums to sync to my iPhone but only after I duplicated them and then moved the duplicated folder from the iPhone Events folder to directly under My Albums folder. I half afraid to try syncing again now that I have moved more albums because I have read in this feed that while moving the albums as I did worked once, the next time it did not.

The main reason I changed from a PC to an Apple computer was to be able to easily keep all of the devices in sync.

That is actually very similar to my prior file management structure. Prior to Catalina, I had smart folders by year (about 4,000 in each year for 10 years) to be able to access things neatly on my phone. Perhaps that better organization by years available on the phone under ios13 is the one piece of the recent change I like.

But as that structure was what was in place when I started having sync issues, it's clearly not my fix now. I actually scrapped those folders as a first step, just trying to sync all of the files. That didn't fix the issue. Then I created a smart folder that just included "All Photos", so basically a mapping of what should have been everything in my library excluding the videos. That also didn't work.

I'm at a loss as to what to do aside from just conceding that until Apple does another major overhaul, it's not going to work how I want it.

Patti - I used the same approach of duplicating albums and have these outside of the iPhone Events folder.

This allowed me to synch my iPad (using USB) and get albums I want back onto my iPad.

I did another synch about a week later and the the albums did stay correctly on my iPad.

That said, I have yet to get up the courage to synch my iPhone to the computer since updating to Catalina.