Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

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

This information is all reasonably fundamental Daniel. The issue is that many of us have been syncing perfectly successfully (with the setup you describe) UNTIL Catalina and iOS13.

iOS13.2.3 is now available and I upgraded both my iPad and iPhone today and subsequently synced my Photos successfully with Catalina. This did involve transfer of 3 or 4 new Photos that had arrived in an album on my Mac and it all worked fine - apart from the sync process seeming to trawl through my other albums, temporarily messing about with the summary numbers etc. But I ended up with the right number of photos in all my albums on both devices so fingers crossed. Will keep you all posted.

CB

I've found a fix.

In short, change your backups to BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA TO THIS MAC.

If you like backing up to iCloud, you can do that as well, I have back ups in both locations, iCloud and then MAC.

I was having this frustrating problem too. Before changing backups, I moved my nested folders outside of the containing albums and it still wasn't synching anything at all. It would synch other data and then just end without adding photos. And it would uncheck all of the photo albums I had checked.

Looking at the wording under the GENERAL/BACKUPS tab:

For iCloud back ups it says, "Back up YOUR MOST IMPORTANT DATA on your iPhone to iCloud" I don't like to use iCloud to store my entire Photos Catalog because that would be too much data. I like having it on my computer with time capsule backups. Looking at how it synchs to iCloud by backing up "only" your important data, instead of the entire iPhone contents—this sparked the notion to change my back ups to BACK UP ALL OF YOUR DATA ON YOUR iPHONE to this MAC.

Before Catalina, I would make back ups to both iCloud and Mac. But since upgrading I hadn't done this and had only backed up to iCloud. So I went ahead and backed up a full copy to my MAC and this fixed my issue.

I was on the phone for almost 2 hours with Apple support and they have no idea of this issue, so I am glad to see that it's not just my iMac. It is a Catalina thing and there is an annoying work around, which is to move any folders you want to sync to the root directory. More about it in this article. It worked for me, but you do lose your folder structure. https://www.5kplayer.com/iphone-manager/fix-macos-catalina-wont-sync-photo-via-finder.htm

What worked for me is the following...

Create a Smart Album where "Photo is referenced"

I found all the pictures that are not being uploaded there.

then I selected all of them and did file > consolidate

then things started magically working.

I think it has to do with any pictures that you don't have saved in the "Photos" directory? Like if you import images from some other location it doesn't know how to deal with that.

Anyway, that worked for me so hopefully this will help someone else.

Patti - I too finally got the nerve to synch my iPhone 11 Pro again. I added a couple more albums (duplicated from those under folders) . These duplicates now ARE NOT UNDER FOLDERS.

I went OK. Took longer than I expected but the new albums showed up and i do not see duplicates.

So I went ahead and did the same for my 2017 iPad. That worked OK too.

EXCEPT - At the end of the sych the phone shows 5.6GB of photos while the iPad shows almost 17GB. AND THEY HAVE THE SAME PHOTOS.

I did see some posts on the board that others have encountered the storage calculation issue.

Bottom line, the work around of pulling albums from under folders seems to work here but there are some strange things going on with Catalina synching using Finder.

Sorry, I'm Swiss and don't speak Englisch very well: Does iTunes really still work on your Mac?? I have on my iMac installed MacOS Catalina (10.15.2). Here iTunes doesn't exist anymore; it's now called Music and belongs only for Music (Version 1.0.2.37). If I plug in my iPad (6. generation; 13.3), I have to go to the Finder, where appears the iPad-Sign. Here appears first "General"

and on the rigth also "Photos". Here I choose "Selected Albums" and then the "Albums" I want.

So that the Albums can be copied on the iPad, I have to do first the following in the App "Photos" (where all my Photos are):

Here I find the Album "My Albums", where all my Photos are in "Folders" and "Albums" (I copied this from the old Programm iPhoto). If an Album is in an Folder, I make a duplicate of the Album an put the Album out of the Folder directly under "My Album". Than it appears in the Finder (see before) and I can copy it on the iPad.

In the meantime (Jan 13, 9.29 am) Patti has posted two screenshots, where you can see, how it looks like.

So, Apple released a new beta developer update today for Catalina and also for iOS. I have downloaded both of these and installed and unfortunately, still does not sync the albums within folders! Via USB CABLE.

I got my hopes up initially as it a pretty big update and took about half an hour to install (Catalina update) ...

on a side note, whilst there have been “workarounds” posted , my workaround was to make smart albums use the rules “album name is “ and then make a smart album of the standard albums that don’t sync. I placed the letter Z In front of these albums so they sort to the bottom of the folder list under the my albums folder , which as you all know , means it will sync. Interestingly enough I synced about 45,000 photos and videos all up... and every photo and video syncs without issue no duplicates no black tiles. Two days later I sync’d again and for the first time ever the sync process did not remove all the photos and re-add them again. I think that problem occurs with standard albums and not smart albums?! Interesting and annoying behaviours ! I would love to Bill Apple for my time!!!

Hey everyone,

I haven’t found a solution but I am getting replies from Apple to gather files and system info etc. and to recreate the problem for them, I guess it’s a positive and creating some ‘noise’ with them.

I did forward the conversations on here to 9to5Mac and other outlets to try and get some coverage, I have no contacts whatsoever with these but in hope someone sees this to start the ball rolling as coverage. I read a post not long ago and someone was getting really, really annoyed, we’re all in the same boat and I hope something happens soon. It’s disappointing when you pay £2,000 on a MacBook or £1,000 on an iPhone and the two can’t talk to each other, especially photos, memories with friends, family and loved ones.

However, I can confirm I have paid £2.99 for a 200GB plan and all my photos have synced ok from the cloud between all my devices, no duplicates and in the correct albums created in photos and there is now no problem so I am almost certain there’s a massive sync issue with photos and finder and that either we’re being persuaded into using iCloud photos or we will have to wait until October when a new version of MacOS is released and iOS 14.

AIRDROP INITIATION WORK AROUND TO ALLOW USB SYNC

Hi all,

Like most of you I've had similar problems getting my phone to sync with my photos folders on my mac book. After several hours of tinkering around, I was finally successful at getting a few folders to sync.

This workaround may work for some as well - I have the function in photos app on my mac turned on so when space is low, the higher quality photo is uploaded to the cloud. It seems like the finder version of sync currently was not allowing enough time to transfer photos and I was trying to understand if it just couldn't get the photos locally or from the cloud for some reason. Example - I have an album of 800 some photos, yet only 40 will transfer/sync to my phone.

With my phone attached to my mac book via usb cable, I selected one of the albums I've had problems with in photos mac book app and choose to share the album via airdrop, but did NOT complete the airdrop. I simply started the process but never selected a device.

Starting the process requires the app to package photos on the computer with any in the cloud - so 800 some photos to download in preparation to airdrop. Once they had downloaded, I left the selection screen where you would choose the device your going to send photos to, never choosing a device and just leaving the screen open.

I went back into finder and ran a sync on that same photos folder I had setup and left open as an airdrop in photos. - and boom after a few minutes all the photos synced back on to my phone through finder via USB. I went back into photos app and cancelled the airdrop that was left open waiting for me to select a device to transfer to - never actually using airdrop.

I've now repeated the process over several folders I could not get to sync previously and it appears this is working - at least for my situation. Hopefully others will have luck with this method.

Mike

"possibly fixes" doesn't sound that optimistic 😄

I have found a workaround though. It's a little cumbersome but you can create a Smart Album and point that to the Album that's nested under a folder. Then you Sync the smart album. It works, it's probably not the answer if you have a lot of folders that you want to sync to your device but it does work.

I've done some rudimentary tests. I re-booted the Mac and iPad after the upgrade. I found that it's best to toggle off Photo syncing and respond to "Remove" photos. Then turn syncing back on. The upgrades solve the syncing of albums within folders. However: (1) sometimes I found that then entire album does not sync ( a photo in the middle of the Mac album did not sync) and (2) Some incomplete syncing is noted at the bottom of the "sync'd" album on the device with "Syncing..." message at the bottom of the album, incomplete. This last problem also occurred when High Sierra came out.

Still not perfect.

Hey all.... I haven’t been reading any of these latest posts on this thread, for over a month now, so I’m not sure where everyone is at, in regards to this major glitch. However, I have some good news here. Apparently, Apple is 100% aware of this issue, and they have senior advisors that are reading this forum, amongst other forums, regarding this photos issue, so they’re seeing everyone’s posts and comments.

A senior advisor contacted me, after reading a few of my comments here on this forum, and I spent a good 3 hours with him on the phone. We detected the main problem, and spent some time addressing the issue. Everything here on my end, is now working perfectly with no glitches at all... No missing photos (not even 1), no duplicates, no blacked out images, etc... My main issue was, each album that was being synced from the Photos App on my 2015 iMac 5k, to my iPhone7 Plus, was missing around 10-15% of the photos. That problem not longer exists.

The solution the senior advisor found out was, the photos library folder was damaged, and needed to be fully repaired. We did a screen share on my iMac and iPhone and worked our way through repairing the original photos library folder. Once we did that, we restarted the computer in ‘safe boot mode’ (Restarting the computer, while holding down the ‘Shift’ key, until you see the Apple logo, then release the ‘Shift’ key). Simple as that... So far, so good... Let u know, if it starts glitching out again. Hope this works for most of you here.

Screen shot below: (New - updated) folder is the repaired one.

I discovered that I have the same problem. My Favorites picture folder in Photos would not sync to my iPhone 8. I tried to reset the Photos Library but it didn't help. Rather than go through all the other suggestions, like creating a new user, I went back to basics. Since I only wanted to sync my photo favorites from my iMac and I don't use iCloud for photos, I simply exported the photos from my Favorites to a new file folder in the Pictures Directory. Then I set that as the sync point for photos and they copied smoothly. It's an extra step but it worked. I'll try the direct method the next time they update the iOS software.

For gvd1 and others using Photos and having Syncing probs.....

(just a first word: before experimenting please backup your entire Library even if it appears to be corrupt, or risk losing everything. Then backup again. On a different medium).

Just old and new random musings given my 35 years experience writing and debugging S/W:

1. (just a repeat for new readers): a few of us have had success with MikeyBananas and gvd1 suggestion: Boot up in Safe Mode and do a Repair on your Photos Library. This helped a few of us even before this week's Catalina Supplemental update.
2. if your Library is not too big, export all the images to hard drive (careful to maintain Quality), delete the Library, create a new Library with whatever Folder / Album structure you want (but no images) and import the images into the new Library. I would import only about 20% of the total images at a time, then do a test Sync - then repeat. Maybe without Folders initially - add Folders later if you want. If my wild guess about Catalina corruption of the Library is correct then this might be the only way to remove the corruption. A painful time consuming fix of course. (There are Apple Scripts that do this for you but also a pain if you are not expert at coding/modifying these scripts).
3. do multiple Library Repairs in a row without doing any Syncing in between (in Safe Mode?). Maybe 4-5 Repairs then try a Sync. My logic here is that the Repair process hasn't yet been updated by Apple to handle (fix) a new form of corruption. Running it multiple times might (?) clean it out "in bits" (this has worked with Hard Disk repairs).
4. have any Users restored a healthy preCatalina Photos Library from backup and found whether this eventually corrupts or found that it never does? If it stays healthy then any new (missing) images only in your corrupt Library could be imported into the restored healthy Library. (I haven’t tried this yet).
5. has Apple explored comparing a Catalina Library with the exact same one backed up before Catalina was installed, to see what the differences are? Then doing a (hopefully) unsuccessful Sync and then comparing the Library after the sync with the one before the Sync, to see what the difference are? If there are differences then THAT is related to the corruption point.

I probably won't test any of the above real soon. My Syncing is now working again, and it's not that I don't care, I'm just busy else where currently. But if any Users are desperate to fix this problem right now then try the suggestions and let us (and hence Apple) know the results. I could say Good Luck but that doesn't seem to help.