Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Yes I have time machine back ups before & after Catalina. I have also portioned my MacBook Pro so I have Catalina with parallels on a 750 gb partition & Mojave on a 250 gb partition. It work just fine but it is a drag having to do it when Catalina should be able to work properly. I underestimated the size of me partition for Mojave, it should have been 300 gb at least but it was an experiment.

i had to register the Mojave under my wife’s Apple ID as it screws up the registration having 2 OS X on one MacBook. I will

‘in all probability wipe my ssd in April & just run on Mojave, unless Apple sort the problem but I am not hopeful anymore.

i can & have copied picture files onto a flash drive from Catalina then imported to Mojave, as Mojave can’t read the uprated Catalina photos en bloc.

i'm not sure if anyone else has posted this - i've not been following this in awhile - but i did figure out a decent work around. apologies in advance if this is redundant. i had (and frankly still have) the same issue of not being able to sync albums from the photos app on my mac to my phone. under the "my albums" folder, i had organized my thousands of photos in specific year folders and then month albums within those years. in the last few months, none of the selected albums would sync.

i did get a decent alternative fix to work for me. it's a little messier than i would like, but i do now have the albums i want synced, on my phone. so, instead of having the albums i wanted to sync several layers down in nested folders, i pulled the desired albums out to live directly under the main "my albums" album and synced.

it works for me. again, my photos app isn't organized as well as i had it or would like it to be, but i'll take it for now.

hope this helps some of you.

I applaud everyone’s positivity and advise to each other and to me. The most recent being have I enabled photo stream sharing.

The answer is no. It’s great some people are prepared to make work around me and fixes. I don’t want to compromise. I was the biggest company on earth to just put it right

My iPhone 7 & iPad Air 2 syncs subfolders in Albums since the last IOS updates as I posted earlier, but some sub folders have several duplicates 🤔. I’ll check further incase they are also on my Mac, but pretty sure they aren’t.

My work colleague & his wife have old iPhone 5’s, they said all works fine. Anyone having the same problem with earlier devices?

Seems the more recent the tec the greater the problem, crazy should be the opposite! What a mess 🤪.

Does anyone know anyone having no problems with newer devices? Ask as they will not likely be reading this. Any difference may be a clue. 🤔 Frankly Apple should be doing all this, I wonder what percentage of devices are suffering, if not enough... that would explain a disappointing lack of interest. 😩

Hello,

i have waited enough now... i installed back mojave to solve this problem. i thought it. now i cant open my photo library :( can anyone help me? is there a trick to open a catalina photolibrary on mojave photo app?

Sadly, you cannot.

Once Catalina converts the library it can no longer be opened in Mojave.

Two Options, that I am aware or:

1-Wait until Catalina becomes stable and the problem is solved. (who the heck knows when that may be)

2-Pull a copy of your Photos Library from a TM back-up (if you have one) from when your Mac was running Mojave

I hope that helps, good luck.

Believe me, I feel the same way!

I can't even go back to my back-up from October 2019 because I have added so many pictures since then. It's maddening.

I have decided to pull away from Apple Photos and spend my energy on PhotoStation by Synology. The catch is you need to have a small Synology box on your network and I understand that many do not want to go thru the expense & trouble. I personally did and I am happy I did. You can "tag" photos, create albums, view them anywhere, etc... Quite a good product overall, but again, I understand it comes at a $ cost.

My issue with reverting back to a clean install of Mojave is that it may or may not resolve the photo sync issue and will take a lot of time to rebuild the library with all the folders and album.

More importantly it may cause other issues specifically with iTunes and my music library. iTunes is done and going away in favour of Apple Music. If Steve Jobs was around iTunes would have been decommissioned a long time ago in favour of the monthly subscription model in Apple Music.

Eventually an upgrade will be required to fix one or another. Right now the loss of functionality in syncing photos sucks but losing functionality of my media would be worse.

Alternatives offered by NAS providers like Synology and Western Digital will do for now. I use WD MyCloud. The interface isn’t pretty like Photos as it’s closer to Finder but it will do until I find something else. I have no hopes in Apple fixing this as they will move to cloud bases interface on a subscription model.

The problem is that there have been comments in this forum that there are also problems with iCloud syncing. It is also my understanding that with iCloud it’s all or nothing and you can set up folders/albums.

With WD or Synology, what happens if for some reason you do have WiFi available. Also when I travel for more than just a couple of days, I shut my entire system off. Wouldn’t you need to leave them running?

@Patti

With a NAS system you don’t actually have the items on your device. You have an app that you interface with it remotely using data/wifi. Similar to how you would with iCloud Drive, Google Drive or Dropbox. You only incur data usage when you access the device and download items. Otherwise a it’s like viewing a webpage.

I have worked out why some aren’t syncing from Mac to phone! Basically if you adjust a Live Photo on your phone and save it. When u upload to the Mac in an album and then save back to your phone when syncing it either ignores the photo and doesn’t count it so ur Mac will say 150 photos in album and phone may have 145. When u revert photo to original on Mac and resync it marries up 150 to 150! Another glitch solved but why isn’t Catalina it photos recognising adjusted phones like it did before under Mojave? Apple should pay me for working that out now they can fix it!

Correct, and I know from personal experience that the Synology can go into sleep mode and be woken up when someone tries to access it.

Mine is never off, but does sleep, and I find it much more secure than putting anything in the cloud or GoogleDrive, etc.

I'm sure for some it has its downsides, but for me it works perfectly and it pretty fast fr viewing when not on the same network.

I do understand the concept of the NAS systems. It would mean more expense, as well as more equipment on my desk. It also would mean leaving my network on when I could be gone for several weeks.

There doesn't seem to be any easy solution other than Apple getting their act together and fixing the problem.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.

Patti

945 replies. Over 10 pages of comments. No fix in sight. At this point. I just want Apple people to at least come on this discussion thread and acknowledge they are aware of this and working on a fix.

There was another syncing problem, I believe in Mojave, which took months to resolve. I don't believe that Apple monitors the community forums unfortunately.

Not sure what the most effective way to escalate this problem. I'm getting disgusted with Apple's poor software quality control.

I waited several weeks to do a clean install of Catalina on my iMac. There was a TM issue that required me to abandon all prior backups prior to my install, another bug that they knew of. Tim Cook announced that they will review their software development process as xxxOS 13 was a total disaster. In the meantime we all suffer. SIGH...