Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Seems to work if you change all albums to root albums. Mine seems to be ok with this setup. However I have over 30,000 photos and hundreds of albums so it was a mammoth undertaking to move all the albums out of folders and rename them. The problem is that with so many albums in the root the list just scrolls and scrolls to try and find something. Photos did a nasty sometime ago ( about 5 years ago) and lost several hundred photos and just left the thumbnails behind. I am now copying any new pics to both photos and another drive where photos are stored in albums by date without the fancy nightmare that the photos library is.

i would ditch photos altogether but I like to use my iPad as a portable photo album and also on Apple TV (I have an a Apple TV 2 and 3 and they seem to work fine with the root directory setup on my iMac. I agree with every one that is an absolute disgrace that apple have still not fixed this.

I've been trying to make photo syncing work between macOS and iOS since Catalina since it was released, but it still doesn't. The albums in folders problem seems to be gone, but re-syncing seems to be unreliable. Finder seems to want to copy thousands of photos all the time. The only thing that occasionally works is to remove the entire iPod Photos cache and then sync to iOS. The other issue is that macOS' photoanalysis daemon is constantly burning through CPU and my laptop is hot to the touch. iOS syncing with Finder isn't even at a beta stage at this point. I would advise to avoid iOS 13.x and macOS 10.15.x altogether. It's a complete disaster. I've never seen problems like this with macOS and iOS before.

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!

I too will be utilizing Photostation by Synology. I’ve given up with the Photos app. This will allow me to migrate away from any proprietary application and use/view my photos across any platform. Their DS File app has been working flawlessly and so has their DS Video.

To highlight my frustration I sync’d my devices one last time before the migration and each came back with different quantities of sync’d photos and videos.

iMac:

6522 photos

83 videos

iPad:

6448 photos

69 videos

iPhone:

6456 photos

69 videos

🤬

I think you will be VERY Pleased with Synology & PhotoStation.

I was using it for years before the Catalina problem and once I saw/knew an Apple solution was not at hand, I abandoned the Photos App and removed Catalina from my iMac as it was also creating havic.

Good Luck!

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.

I updated my iMac and iPad Air 3 10 13.6 today. I repaired the Photos Library, used the "remove" photos options and performed a sync. Albums within folders sync'd. However, randomly, not all photos for albums sync'd successfully. Some albums did and some did not. Incomplete albums showed "Syncing..." at the bottom of the album. Successfully albums displayed the number of photos at the bottom of the album. I performed another sync by adding another album to the list of already selected albums. That album sync'd completely, others remained the same. Did not notice any duplicates as others have noted.

Syncing is still broken. I wish there was a credible 3rd party where this could be escalated and exposed to Apple enthusiasts. That might get Apple's attention.

I finally bit the bullet and bought 2TB iCloud subscription to get this over with. Now I am on Apple Support and the person helping me because now my 30,000 photos are all duplicated on iCloud. He has never heard of the finder sync issue. When he linked to my computer and saw my desktop I showed the 78,000 responses to this support community, but he clearly has not heard there way a sync problem.

Apple is not going to fix this. We have to find other solutions, like Synology NAS server. Unfortunately this costs again more money after investing a lot to expensive Apple devices, which are not able to deliver such a basic function like syncing photos. If I were in US I would consider a lawsuit...

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?

Yes, there are about 78,000 posts here regarding these issues. These problems have varied a little with each new iteration of Catalina and the iOS, but overall the sync method that used to work as part of iTunes, prior to Catalina does not work anymore. You can try contacting Apple support as I have several times, but nobody there has even heard that this issue exists, even though there are so many posts here in this support community. About the only real solution is to move your photos to iCloud with a monthly subscription to get around this issue.

That’s interesting, after the latest iOS update this week all my “synced from the Mac” folders were gone. So I whipped all fotos again in finder and resynced ... and it seems that this sync is complete and correct.

The persons are still not correct in sync so maybe that’s because of the named problem reported by you with manually picked faces.

So did I get it right, the solution might be:

1) delete all persons on mac

2) let photos identify them again

3) never ever touch the automatic identified picture

OR

create a folder containing the faces of my choice and dont sync this folder?

matthias

ErnoidHK88... I too have kept abreast of this thread and provided updates when Apple has updated the OS's. After my post I did a check with photo counts of the sync'd album that had the notation "Syncing..." at the bottom of the album. To my surprise all photos had sync'd. So why didn't the album have the number of photos and videos noted at the bottom?!? And then I noticed that some sync'd albums had neither notation. Weird.

I will do some testing concerning the key photo scenario you noted. Thanks for following up on my findings. No one else noted the "Syncing..." issue.

Nogee43,

What you saw initially as incomplete but eventually got synced seems like the lengthier time it now takes to sync photos. It seems the idevice hasn’t had enough time to uncompress the transferred photos and structure.

I am speculating that before we all faces this problem, photos and album structure were actually synced in real time. Once the Mac says a sync is done, the sync is also done on the device (truly done).

With Catalina or iOS 13, it seems they were trying to shorten the transfer time of a sync by “packing” all the photos and album structure into a compressed file, transfer this compressed file to the idevice, and leave it to the idevice to unpack and arrange. But how ironic the result.

Thats why you will see at the bottom of the Mac’s finder, during a sync, the numbers of photos showing as successfully copied in a relatively constant and quick manner, but even when the sync is reported as completed and you unplug the sync cable, you will still see the number of photos continue to increase (albeit slowly) under “Photos” (“Photos”: lower left icon of the photo app, very bottom).

I am speculating here of course as only Apple or God knows the syncing logic.

Unfortunately, I have never gone into each syncing album and looked at the bottom to comment on whether I see a final number of synced photos or the word “syncing”. I always only examine the “total count” under “Photos” (lower left icon of the photo app, very bottom) and the album count from the top level.

It was when the “total count” under “Photos” was stuck at “Syncing” hours after a sync, and a few album counts (top level reading) were missing 1 or 2 photos, that tipped me off on a pattern of problematic photos.

I painstakingly compared the problematic albums between the idevice and the Mac photo library, and realized all the missing (still “syncing”) photos were those I had used as key photos