Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

So, the struggle continues.

Doing more investigation into my problem which is - SOME albums contain images that appear black when synced from MAC to either my iPad, or wife's iPad. The problem does not exist on our iPhones.

I have spent over 45 hours with Apple Support over the last 10 days maximising my time on furlough!

I have experienced some great support, and some awful!

The problem is not resolved.

It does appear that the majority of the pictures come from a handful of albums. All of these albums happen outside of our home country of UK. A lot of these were Live Photos. We tried, repair tool, restoring iPads, trying in a new photo library, duplicating and deleting originals. The only thing that worked to an extent was duplicating, although one album just wouldn't budge and never display.

Now they all display on IPAD if shared, just not via sync.

I am going rogue now and trying my own solutions, unfortunately prepared to encounter some cost for iCloud which is unfair as being pushed into it. The dilemma here is only one can sync via iCloud to the mac - ME - as the Mac is against my ID.

My Questions i'm hoping for support on, Could we copy the library, add to External hard drive, and then create new user on MAC with her id, therefore allowing her to sync via i cloud to that version , and me to the normal.???? I think so but want to check?

And also, for the golden ticket, could i create new user on the mac, and then user the SHARED folder in the MAC (MAC/Users/Shared) and move the whole library there. Therefore i can login to the mac as normal, and when here have it syncing via i cloud, and my wife can login to her user and have the SAME library sync via her iCloud id?

Thoughts?

I Agree!

I have mentioned this here several times before. I have moved all of my information to a Synology NAS and I use their application for photos called PhotoStation6.

And while I understand that not everyone wants to do this or has the funds to do it I can tell you that it works, PERFECTLY!

There are two downsides (aside from an additional hardware investment).

1-It does not Sync with with an iPhone or iPad, so if you want the images on your device it might not be for you.

2-The NAS must remain ON all of the time (although there is a sleep mode) if you want to access your images.

It does have an app that allows you to connect to the NAS, anytime, anywhere and it's crazy fast.

It allows for Image-GEO Tagging and Meta data and you can do it in batch form.

It allows you to back-up to Google-Drive thru their Sync program and then even view images in Google Photos.

I started out using the Synology a few years back as a back-up to my iMac, but now it holds all of my data, not just images...and I'm am not looking back!

Apple has forgotten about its core base, the people that put them on the map, Designers, Photographers, Illustrators, etc, and that's sad to see.

So if you have the time and the funds you may want to check out Synology.

Good Luck All!

Thanks all.

i have my final call tomorrow with Apple after the senior member referee it to engineering for five days. I am not expecting it to suddenly work but also will be refusing to spend loads of time on it.

After 45 hours in a week looking at this, I don’t think they or anyone can consider it to be fair on us as consumers.

Angers me I will continue to use the products as I do find them great mostly but definitely lesson learnt, apple is not as great as should be

I hadn’t tried a sync to my phone for awhile and thought I would with recent updates so I selected the option to sync certain photos folders of pictures. It took forever to sync, I know not why and when it was done my phone had many, many folders of photos I never selected. OMG! What a mess. Can we please figure out how to bring back Steve Jobs and fix this mess?

Hi All,

Just updated to Catalina and I have the same problem. Some (Smart) Album have only some photos, other are complete. One album is missing. I tried to remove photos for the iPhone, restart the Mac, restart the iPhone, restart the washing machine....

No error, no output, nothing at all...

The only reason for this is that Photos is crap! Sync process is (that BTW was working great in the past) is crap!

Apple, you really need to go back to the basics!

Don’t hold your breath, the problems with photos & music have been since the release of Catalina, duplicate pictures, back ups hanging then not transferring to iPhone.

like many others I just live with the system as it is, periodically clearing out the dross.

Hi everyone.

I have just tried it with latest update to mac, 10.15.5 along with most update iPad os, 13.5. Same result - some black images in my photos.

71 pages, and no sign Apple taking serious. I have a call with them today as have spent over 50 hours, and has gone up to senior engineer team but i am not kidding myself, not expecting much.

I remember the early Apple ads that poked fun at Microsoft. Being in IT I thought that was a bit cavalier. Apple has become just another tech company. Their software quality control, software support and customer support has really suffered. Catalina showed this and Tim Cook pledged that this would be overhauled.

I was waiting to see if anyone had any success too. I may try to rebuild the photos file noted previously and see if that makes any difference. It pains me every time I have to do a sync to get my desired photos onto my iPad. Not the Apple experience I thought I had joined.

Luckily, if you can call it lucky, I never tried syncing my iPad after what happend with my iPhone. While it does not have all of my pictures, It has many more of the albums than what I now have on my phone.

I decided to rebuild the Photos Library (Option-CMD and click on Photos app) before testing 10.15.5 syncing to my iPad Air 3.

The syncing does drill down to albums within folders, which was the original reported problem.

I still have some incomplete albums and see the "Syncing..." message at the bottom of those incomplete albums. I noticed that the iPad was still processing the sync after all signs look to be completed from the Finder window. This was noted in an earlier post. I did let it process for some time but still had random incomplete albums on my iPad.

Photos seems ok but iTunes is junk. I can’t even download a new album from the iTunes Store(iPad & iPhone XR have downloaded fine so it’s the Mac OS X) I tried to add music via ext DVD player., no joy, Fault displays. Also some existing albums have been deleted. So for me it’s a retrograde step. I have the previous update on an external drive which works fine plus time machine backups from before Catalina was released on my LaCie drive.

it seems i have a bit of work to do to restore some files, perhaps by reverting to the previous release. I will wait a day or two to see what other mysterious fall out of the ether. Any one had other disasters from Apple. Don’t you just love them to bits😩

Seems the answer is to use iCloud to sync photos these days.

I started using and paying for iCloud storage when Apple first had the issue of syncing Mac photos across devices when they update iOS to Mojave and iTunes was not syncing properly.

since then, it worked like a charm until Catalina.

I have had lots of wasted hours with Apple support trying to solve the problem and have give up.

with the latest iOS on iPhone X and iPad Pro as well as macOS 10.15.5 ICAN sync photos across all my devices just by using iCloud.

when Itake photos on my iPhone they appear on my iPad and my iMac photos seamlessly. Also putting those photos into designated albums is reflected on all my devices.

My only problem now is that when I connect my phone or iPad to my Mac by cable, macphotos does not recognise my photos on phone or iPad as being already imported to my Mac and it wants to import them all again....duh! Seems this might be a issue with the Catalina version of the photos library not working correctly.

Still not 100% working as it should but certainly far better than not using iCloud and relying on finder syncs.

It seems so bad that Apple can’t get it right when google photos has not trouble syncing photos across all devices without even setting the sync in motion...so seamless

No offence Andreahackney but paying for iCloud and it still doesn’t work is even more of a disaster. Now you’ve paid for something twice and it still dose t work. The next $ I throw at this problem is to upgrade to a Synology NAS. At least I won’t have to worry about missing files, photos, documents or media with Apples next OS failure. Time to kill the ecosystem and start fresh. I’m sure you like many of us here switched to Apple because “it just works”. If that is no longer the case there is no reason to pay for the premium.

I thank you for your contribution. Please do not take this post as a negative tone to you or anyone else struggling to find a solution that is only Apples to resolve.

You must have misunderstood my comments re my photos syncing across all my devices at the present time and via iCloud. AsI said above, when I take photos on my iphone they are immediately synced with my iMac and my iPad so my new photos appear on all my devices without me having to do anything..

I can then put these new photos in albums using the photos app on my iMac and they appear in the correct albums on all my devices... this sync automatically via icloud so worth paying $4 a month (less than the cost of a cup of coffee)

The only issue I have now is if I connect my phone or ipad via cable to my iMac it wants to import all my photos again... and I do not allow this to happen as the photos are already there.

For me the problem is nearly solved and I can live with the last little issue now we have ll got used to Apple NOT performing as well as it used to.

Andreahackney

I'm only commenting on your statement: "if I connect my phone or ipad via cable to my iMac it wants to import all my photos again" - I just want to make sure that you do NOT have "Sync Photos to your Device from..." checked (ticked) in Finder when you plug your iPhone or iPad into your iMac. That COULD be why it wants to import your photos again.

If you already knew this, sorry - just wanted to make sure. 😀