Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Dear Apple.

PLEASE - just do your duty and fix this ANNOYING BUG.

Sync only works by 1. deleting all synced pics and then 2. syncing again.

And - when repairing this - have a look a "Persons" on the connected iPhone/iPad and STOP to destroy with each sync the Person Collection.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE.

Yes exactly. The other heavy lack of Apple's Photos.app, is that you never will know if your library is corrupted. Of course you can repair it, but nobody can be shure that the library is really OK. And there is NO WAY to save a CLEAN COPY of the library, a new one, like it is possibile in most Apps.

In my case, the library is not recent, i began to manage my iphone pictures when Photos.app had another name (iPhoto?). Syncing was then perfect, even with 30K images.

jrf my sentiments entirely! I am happy to pay for iCloud as it also gives me freedom from the Apple photos syncing problem.

For the cost of a cup of coffee a month, I can now have my photos synced across all devices using iCloud.

Shame Apple can’t fix the problem though...

Oh, and of course MacOS 16 ("Big Sur"???) is coming in Sept 2020.

I will bet my life's savings that this will either fix the Photos syncing problem for all, or make it worse again for most of us. Betcha.

lol. :)

It's june 25th 2020. I am updated to Catalina 10.15.5 (like even more rescent of the version mentioned above) and my macbook still doesn't sync photos to my iPhone X. Please let there be an actual fix and not just waiting for an update to either iOS.. :/ Both my phone and macbook are updated. I have tried everything I can to fix the problem locally, restarting my phone and laptop, unchecking and checking the boxes before syncing multiple times. Nothing worked and this is unacceptable in my opinon.

wow! I just upgraded from high Sierra to Catalina; is this issue resolved now? Should I go back to high Sierra? How scary! I have over 20k photos but I just enabled iCloud photos this week for the first time ever. And I totally forgot about them phasing out iTunes!?! That is going to be a learning curve for me

NextelMichaelG wrote:

d6v1d wrote:

Well, guys, the problem is definitely still there. This is really unacceptable.

I would be happy to use iCloud, but I use the photos app on the Mac as an archive (I guess like many other users). I keep a large library there, mostly because I want to keep all the Live Photos and the Portrait edit features (both live photos and portrait edit features are lost if the pictures are exported out of the iOS device or the mac Photos app). I have albums and smart albums to sort the selected pictures I want to have on my iOS devices.

iCloud syncs the entire library, and (as far as I know), it's not possible to choose only some albums to be synched (I know it's possible using 3rd party programs such as PowerPhotos, creating two different libraries, but I don't think it's the best solution). I would be happy to pay for iCloud, but I think this feature should be essential and it's pretty easy to be implemented; and mostly, it was implemented before on the iTunes synching.

Any beta tester or developer has tested this behavior on the new iOS 14 and the new MacOS 11 Big Sur?

So do you manually backup your photos from your devices to your Mac? Can you elaborate on how you do that? Having Photostream enabled used to achieve this for me, as it just kept storing and storing on my Mac, however, it doesn't include videos;

Portrait & Live Photos losing their features outside of Apple's ecosystem is simply NOT TRUE. I went to my Google Photos (where I backup all my photos) after I read this from you to confirm -my photos retain their Portrait & Live Photos features when they're backed up

Hey @NextelMichaelG

Yes, I do the backup manually (via the import option on Photos when my device is connected by cable -yes, by cable...-)

If you read my post again, I don’t write what you said. I’m sure there are 3rd party services that keep the live photos and portrait features. If I save my pics as a file, I lose their cool features, that’s why I want to keep the archive on the Mac Photos app.

I don’t want to use other services for something it should just work on the native mac apps. I’ve paid for a mac and for its software (many $) because I like what I get (It used to be) and because I want to use it. This buggy behavior is a new thing, it used to work fine in the past. If this things keep happening in the future I will consider moving to another better platform, then I will be open to other software options.

I don't have those devices, an X and an oldish Ipad Air2 and it's not fixed for those.

Atrocious software, very reminiscent of Windows in its worst iterations

I find it does work from "My Albums" but only with a random number of pictures, say 2 from 39 or 1 from 15. I note while in the photo inspection window for the device clicking an album away reduces the audio bar and the photos bar. Delete more albums and the audio bar stays the same even to the point of deleting all albums, but the photo bar remains the same width

I'm no expert, but it this allocation of memory on the device to albusm, considering all the albums at root are there but with a tiny number of pictures. Easy to copy all photos but the number in the albums stays the same at very few.

Note the purple bar shrank a little when the first album was unticked so too the orange photo bar, delete all ticks, no change evident

For me the problem started with the iOS13 update on my mobile devices. iOS13 provided a different way to handle Photos in the Photos.App

One big problem is that Apple doesn't provide a possibility to do a "clean" copy of an existing Photos library. It is not possibile to simply perform "Save as" or "Export a clean copy of the Library" in the Photos.App on MacOSX. So the Photos library is the same file since years and contains all kind of junk files, corrupted files and files form different iOS and Cameras, file formats, and so on.

We can discuss al our issues here, but we will get no solutions form Apple.

What I find extremely disgraceful and very very unprofessional by Apple is that you get no support at all even if you pay for AppleCare support. They just don't care and you will only lose your time providing data of your devices to Apple, re-installing Software and OS, without any solution.

So everyone sharing this problem here should feel scandalously defrauded by a Company that has lost all the charateristics that made it unique in paste times. The behaviour of Apple is just offending all of us.

Mac Mini (Late 2014) running Catalina 10.15.5

iPad Pro 2018 11-inch on iOS 13.5.1

iPhone 8 on iOS 13.5.1

Photos sync still isn't working.

1. Albums inside folders don't sync at all on my iPad. It syncs but flattens on my iPhone.
2. Albums at the root level sync. But not all photos sync. Many are just black squares inside the albums for both iPhone and iPad.

Already repaired the photo library.

Transferred from external drive to internal SSD and re-repaired.

Already set as Use as System Photo Library.

Not using iCloud syncing.

This just worked in the old versions of iPhoto and iTunes. Very frustrating and disappointing specially coming from a company that's known for quality products.

Anybody have any other ideas how to fix this? I'm thinking of just copying all my photo folders to a 1TB OTG thumb drive just so I have access to my photos on my iOS devices. :(

Oddly I did a sync with my iPad Pro 2nd generation from MacBook Pro touchbar both On the latest updates. My Mac deleted all my pictures but replaced them correctly. Music was odd in that I added some albums to my existing music but the albums already on the iPad did not show in the library as installed Nor were they deleted by my Mac. So I had to recall what was on the iPad in order to add extra. So I managed to do what I wanted although not in the way I expected.

For me music is the main problem at the moment, I will be cautious with the next updates.😱

I gave up months ago. I cannot waste anymore time or energy on this problem and I have abandoned the Photos App and instead have moved all of my photography to a Synology NAS and I use the Synology app called PhotoStation.

Yes, I understand it’s not a solution for everyone and there are funds that need to be invested, but for me this was a clean and elegant solution at a reasonable price point.

If interested, check it out, if not, thanks ok too. Just trying to point other frustrated users in a direction to save time & energy.

Good Luck all!

Having the same issues. Some photos are duplicated up to three times on macOS 10.15.6 / iOS 13.6. Also, if you try to disable photo syncing, Finder doesn't actually do that. When I disabled, it copied all the photos over yet again to my iPhone causing duplications. There are some missing photos on iOS for me as well.

The Synology was a great recommendation and need not be an expensive solution. The devices are scalable. Start out with 2 bay model like the DS718+ and install the hard drives best suited for your current storage needs. From there you can upgrade the hard drives or add an expansion bay module. It’s very simple to set up. Beat of all it provides redundancy to your photo, media and documents currently on your computer or external drives.

Heres a link to a YouTube’er that’s created a great playlist on how to set them up. Step by step conscience instructions although the device software is very intuitive that most won’t need this level of detail.

https://www.youtube.com/c/mydoodads

Just upgraded to macOS Catalina. Now unable to syn photos from my iPhone 8 to my iMac. Only see empty white boxes except for about less than 10 actual pictures seen. Have latest version of the macOS. Anyone with same experience? Anyone with solution?