Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Actually this problem is only fixed if you have a machine recent enough to run iOS 13. It still does not work if your iOS device is too old to run 13. I have taken all my albums out of their nested folders and put them in the root level of hierarchy it does work but what a f***ing mess; the albums number in the many hundreds and scroll right off the screen. Very difficult to find something. If there was an easy to transfer them all to adobe PSE organizer I would but then there would be a problem with Apple TV. I guess I'm stuck with this mess until I can afford some new equipment!

just tried again after over a. month. It actually worked sort of. It pulled the albums out of the folder and synced them ignoring the folder completely. This was with my iPhone 6 on iOS 12 and iPad mini 2 on iOS 12. I guess it's too much to ask to maintain the directory structure in iOS

Directory structure has never worked. I don’t think it’s even suppose to on you iOS devices.

As for you albums, double check that your total photo imported match the amount imported to your device. I was 10-15% less on my iOS devices and that didn’t included the photos that I have on my camera roll on my devices that haven’t been imported to my iMac.

Directory structure has never worked. I don’t think it’s even suppose to on you iOS devices.

Correct. No current Apple Photo app "speaks" folder. All photos are stored in one large album called All Photos. You then use tags, albums or smart albums & metadata to organize them.

Most issues between the legacy iTunes syncing processes and iCloud syncing stem from this I would think. Most DAM/photo management apps have gone this way in recent years. Less reliance on location/folders and more on image metadata. This way one image can be tagged dozens of ways but only live in one folder on a storage medium. A single copy.

I didn’t check all of them for complete transfer as I have hundreds of albums. I did however check a number of them and they seemed ok. I do remember previously before the latest updates that there were a large number of photos missing. Hash photos in the App Store seems to do a decent job again it has a problem with folders but seems to extract the albums well (free version)and seems to have some decent add ones for a small fee.

Replying to pharmercist (and others who have made progress):

I have followed this issue(s) since the beginning and just repeating there is no specific pattern or fix that applies to everyone. It is some form of serious corruption in Catalina, and/or Photos library when Catalina was installed.

Different unpleasant side effects for different people and different fixes work for different people, and no fix will work for many.

I couldn't sync to my iPhone 6 (IOS 12) reliably initially no matter what I did. Then there was an early update to Catalina and suddenly, after several repairs to my Photos library, it all synced. Folders and albums on my iMac sync correctly to my iPhone 6. And this has stayed reliable. My initial corruption is gone?????

Unfortunately the initial problem is messy & varied, and I don't think Apple can solve all forms of it. They need to provide a tool that sucks the photos out of Photos correctly and then imports them back into a brand new Photos library without any corruption. If you you do this sort of thing yourself, from backups etc. it works for some but not others.

If you are up to date with upgrades and have tried most of the suggestions in this forum and it hasn't helped, then nothing, except (unlikely) special help from Apple, is going to solve your problem.

But keep protesting and providing feedback in Apple Support. https://getsupport.apple.com

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

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?

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

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 believe that this has been an issue from the beginning and still hasn't been completely resolved. Only last week I was finally able to upgrade to Catalina. And only tonight discovered that all the albums (in folders and not) that I formerly synced to my iPhone with iTunes were no longer on my phone. I (finally) found the dialog that used to be in iTunes lurking in the Finder (it makes sense, but it's not highlighted in any update tour). As previously set in iTunes, the settings for Syncing Photos was "Selected Albums" and "Include Videos", but then looking at the list of albums actually selected, there were none. And indeed, there were no photos "From My Mac" on my iPhone.

Couldn't the development team merely keep the old iTunes functionality? This is clearly a poor effort. When backup and sync was the province of iTunes, this worked. Not only that, but as one selected specific albums or folders in iTunes, it would display the number of photos included in the selection. No more.

So it seems that some of the bugs reported above have been fixed, but fundamentally Catalina "sync Photos" in the Finder just forgets the work we've done in previous versions to sync our photos to our phones. I am not a fan of AI-curated albums. I spend a great deal of effort organizing and maintaining our photos. So, please, Apple, respect the work that we do and stop with the poor QA and partial fixes!

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.

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.😱