Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

You don't need to delete your Albums. I have now discovered a different way of doing this so we can get our photos back on our phones as Albums just how they used to be. The photos need to be moved out of Folders and made into Albums on their own. Go into the Folder holding the Album of photos, click on the Album name and drag the photos up and drop them in My Albums. It means that the original photos are just moved to a new position but keep the original name. Sync and you should find that the photos are on your phone just as they used to be. I've done this today and all my photos are showing on my phone just as they used to before Catalina came along. Until Apple get the syncing problem sorted out this appears to be the only way of getting our photo albums on our devices the way we want to. Hope that all makes sense!

Sarn1951

Even though (as people are tired of me saying) I don't use the Photos app - I am curious - now that you have done this, what happens if you add or remove some photos from an album or two, and try the sync again. Does it work, and quickly? Any problems or duplicates, etc? Maybe you could try it as a test and report back.

Just a suggestion. 😀

This has been mentioned previously in this thread, but it's not a solution as the issue is that many of us have a folder structure we want to keep and so do not want to move folders out. So yes, it works for now, but Apple still needs to fix this.

I can’t tell you how surprised I was to receive a response not only so quickly but at all from the Corporate Executive office.

Keeping my fingers crossed that this will actually be corrected soon. The gentlemen that I spoke to made sure that I had his phone number & email address so that I could contact him directly if something else should occur. He also said that he would contact me if he received any updated information.

Patti, thanks for sharing the Information.

Did you tell the Executive that it would be a good idea for Apple technicians to follow Apple Support Communities?

If they did, they would be able to feel a little better what is going wrong with their software.

Similar sync problem here. My iPad has synced photos with my MacBook Pro. Since it's way too many photos and my iPad is packed full now, I tried to delete them from the iPad again.

The problem:

I cannot delete them anymore. The iPad doesn't sync when I unselect "sync photos" with MacBook Pro. It advises that all photos will be deleted and then starts syncing, but then stops at some time because "the sync session could not be closed" (or similar - translated from French).

I cannot delete them manually from the iPad either. The "bin button" does not work with those pictures.

The result:

iPad with 128GB of storage is full and I cannot use it properly anymore.

APPLE please solve this problem !!!

Thank you Patti, I have the same problems and I was waiting since they launched Catalina an update to fix it or have someone take it seriously like you, thanks.

Now you have a real technical support I would like to add another bug, if it happens to everyone, with the live photos if you modify it to bounce from the mac it synchronizes as something static, like regular photo.

If you reset to live in Mac and sync, you can set bounce at phone.

It seems as he was only able to synchronize lives not other types like bounce.

Good morning.

As a matter of fact, I did. I also included that in my letter to Tim Cook. I also told them both that depending on who you spoke to in Tech Support, they were either aware of the problem or didn't have a clue and in order to escalate the problem to the next level they would first have us do everything we already had done either on our own or with other Tech Support Reps.

Don't know if it will change how they do things but lets hope.

Frankly, I'm surprised you were able to sync Live Photos at all that maintain it being Live. I know that Live Photos, as well as videos do not show up in Photo Stream which is typically how I get my photos into my iMAC & before that into my MacBook Pro and I would have to Air Drop them which, of course, puts them into my Download folder and then I have to import them.

If they get the syncing issue resolved, I can live with the Air Dropping.

In the past I use the same procedure with air drop or just copy with preview.

Now I use import in photos app with the phone wired connected, if everything works fine the program detect the type as Live Photo and you can check it in content type menu, Live Photos.

If you don't change any at this Live Photo you can sync with any lose to the phone, can someone verify?

Typically once I have a Live Photo in my MAC and place it in the appropriate album, it stays Live when I sync that Album back to my device. Prior to Photo Stream, I used to import my photos the same way you are doing so.

Here’s my latest realization in looking at the mess that is the attempted synced library between my Mac and phone.

While my library appears as I want it to in photos on my Mac, the process of syncing all photos via finder is clearly the problem - with thousands of photos not appearing and just as frustrating a large number of duplicates appearing. I’ve now observed that the photos appearing on my phone in duplicate and in some cases triplicate are ones that were separately added to shared libraries. I have one of photos of my son which I created for the extended family. There is also another one created by a relative for their son. Many of those photos appearing as duplicates on my phone were ones I put in the share. Those appearing in triplicate appear to be those which I individually added to my son and my nephew’s shares.

And weirdest of all, I’ve observed that some of the photos in my nephew's share which I did not load but which I did comment on or like have appeared locally on my phone.

How’s that for broken!?

I have found that if i sync "all photos and albums" from my iMac(10.15.2) to my iPad(13.3) or iPhone(13.3) that it will copy everything i have over. Likewise if you pic an album that is NOT under a Folder that will sync by itself just fine. No i do not use iCloud for photos but it do have My Photo Stream (MPS) going thru iCloud. That way when i take a pic on my iPhone it shows up in MPS on iMac where i can then put it into a proper album.

My guess, is that there is a code glitch for traversing the folder structure to get the chosen albums. AND i am guessing they do "sync all" a different way in the code.

Side note: Apple should look at doing folders in the Photos app in iOS.

It's almost 3 months for this issue. That I guess Apple could fix it very easy, but do nothing. I don't think any help we are shouting here or complaints in this Apple site as some member mentioned here previously. Let's try start a group/discussion in Youtube and Tweeter can help the issue fix.

Keep in mind that any fix is going to be part of a bundle update release which is not going to be something issued every day. This is one of many items that many teams of programmers are left correcting. Yes, it has been hugely annoying that this issue has persisted for three months now. But such is the speed of tech. Barring a security patch or other potential PR disaster, we are going to wait.