Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Come to think of it, this speculative new compress and unpack step to replace in-flight real-time sync, is what might still be causing users to see photos being removed and resynced on each new sync, incremental albums or not. Thus syncs are ironically taking longer (despite you can free yourself from the Mac earlier).....

thoughts?

The problem I have is that now, when I click on iPhone, I get lots of empty (white) squares except for a few squares filled with pictures.

Before Catalina, those empty squares would be completely filled with/by pictures that are new in the phone and have not been downloaded to the iMac.

Don’t understand why this has happened & can’t find a way to populate the white squares with actual pictures.

What this means, I think, is the pictures my be “syncable” but I have no idea what pictures/photos I am syncing as I can’t see them physically.

Does anyone else having similar issues ?

Unfortunately, your problem is nothing new that has been reported in page after page in this discussion. It appears that Apple is doing nothing about correcting the issue that started when they came out of Catalina. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that when their next operating system comes out it will be corrected.

ErnoidHK88 This is getting interesting...

I was able to identify some of the albums associated with the Key Photo in the People Album and decided to just sync a few of those albums with the addition of an album that didn't have anyone noted in the People Album, let's call it X Album. I also thought that there may be a link to this problem with photos used for the image in Contacts. I edited my contacts with faces from my iPad Photos because I could scale the picture easier in the iPad version. My contacts are shared with my iMac and all iDevices.

I prepared for a sync by "removing" the photos and selected the same albums. Of the six albums, five had the "Syncing.." note at the bottom of the the album on my iPad. This supports your idea. The X Album sync'd properly no message at the bottom.

I then edited a contact with a photo from the X Album on my iPad. Sync'd again. Initially the X Album did not have the "Syncing..." note but a few moments later it appeared! At least that's what I think happened. It confirms your thought about latent processing.

I also checked the photo count of an album that has "Syncing..." and noticed that on the iPad, a photo was missing. Accounting for photos on my iMac to the iPad I determined it was the photo used for the face in the People Album.

It appears "Syncing..." appears at the bottom of the album when this situation is encountered. If the album syncs properly and photos only take up one page of my iPad, no note appears. If there is more than one page of photos being displayed on the iPad, a count of photos and videos appears at the end of the album.

I have not experienced the duplicates or blank photos. I my not using iCloud photos or Photostream. I normally migrate any photos taken on an iDevice and import or AirDrop to my iMac, then delete from iDevice. I put the photos into an album and eventually sync desired albums to my iDevice. I use the iMac as my repository for photos. I also keep a copy of the albums as a separate folder in Documents as one of my backups.

Thanks for your hypothesis as it helped me understand some of the peculiarities.

Thanks Nogee43. Glad to see the problem is replicable and hypothesis somewhat verified. With this nailed down, how can we get Apple to pay notice and fix it?

On your contacts manipulation (something I never tried), are you suggesting the use of photos from

an idevice for the purpose of assigning it to a contact, will also “break” that album’s sync Status from complete to “syncing”?

I have seen the "Syncing..." note in a couple more albums that I cannot ensure that it was a result of previously mentioned Key Photo or Contacts process. I don't think I will troubleshoot this further as I think it's time for Apple to ante up and resolve this completely. Heck, macOS 14 will soon be out. I will wait for awhile before I upgrade. For now, I'm not sure how to get Apple's attention on this matter.

And yes, the Contacts process appears to cause the "Syncing..." notation on sync'd albums. I use Contacts on my iPad to update the contacts with a photo of the person from photos in the Photo app. It's easy to scale the headshot. The image appears with texts and phone calls on the Mac and iDevices as well as on my car's display.

For others having the problems with blank photos and/or duplicates, I have not encountered this problem. I would give it a try to repair the photos library by holding down Option & Command keys as you click on the Photo app on the Mac. This will cause your Shared albums and people to be rebuilt after the repair is complete on the Mac. Good Luck

I tried deleting all People on macOS (10.15.6) and repairing my library, but I'm still getting duplicates and photos not being synced at all. The weird thing is -- the entire "People" album was still on my iPhone after removing them on macOS, repairing the library, and doing a "remove" and then resyncing to iOS (13.6). I tried doing another full sync after removing the photo cache as well, and there are still problems. Some photos didn't sync at all. Some were duplicated. This has been the situation since Catalina and iOS 13 was released.

> you will still encounter incomplete syncs on your idevice, showing “syncing” at the bottom of incomplete albums, when ANY album happens to contain a photo where you have selected a face to be the KEY PHOTO under the PEOPLE you favorited in your Mac Photo Library

Does this apply only to macOS 10.15.6 and iOS 13.6? Do you know if this workaround might work in macOS 10.14.6?

I just once again recreated Photos.app 4.0 library in macOS 10.14.6 and the photolibraryd should have done its job quite soon (34000 images, 2500 movies, 400 GB). I have then always confirmed dozens of people but should I now NOT do it? Or create a special album for people's profile pics or key photos and never sync it, right? I have never knowingly set any key photos -- do the chosen Contacts pics play any role here?

Syncing Photos library to iOS devices via iTunes has been very flaky during the last years and recently it has got even worse with numerous either missing or duplicated images. A few years ago in great frustration I even emailed Tim Cook hoping some kind Steve Jobs moment but only got a lukewarm reply from some secretary proposing telephone consultation when I already had explained all possible and impossible details about the matter.

Hi All,

I cleared all the Faces from my library, rebuilt it, but still no luck: some album still miss several photos.

But I had an interesting finding today:

I migrated the library from Aperture, and I had some photos inside the Library and some as referenced files.

This structure has been preserved when I migrated to Photos.

It seems that when an album contains both type of photos (referenced and not), then the sync is failing.

I reorganised one of the album that had issues, moving all internal photos as external reference and now the sync is working fine.

I'll keep doing this in the next days (a lot of albums) and will let you know if situation improves.

In any case this is a ridiculous bug and it's a shame that Apple has not spent one hour looking into this!

Ciao

I have found that clearing my iPhone library before adding to it seems to work for my iPhone 11 & iPad Pro. iTunes music is a drag as albums go missing from my MacBook Pro touch-bar. Can’t wait to see what new disasters await for the next operating system Release. Still it stops us getting board.😂

I tried the macOS 10.15.6 Key photos workaround with a freshly created Photos 4.0 library in macOS 10.14.6 and iOS 13.6: This time I didn't confirm any people so (as always) I didn't manually add any faces as Key photos.

I then synced four albums with 34000 images and two albums with 53 movies via iTunes to an iPad Pro so about 130 GB was left as free space there. This time about 2700 images failed to sync... Repeated syncs were quick and didn't add any missing images.... I tried to check which images were missing but that is very difficult to spot among thousands of images. Previously even whole albums have failed to sync and then it was easy to see...

I recently tested whether syncing plain folders (instead Photos library) via iTunes was any better but also then numerous images failed to sync.

I have also tried to empty Photos library cache inside its package but that didn't fix the problem either.

Don’t understand all these complicated technicalities.

Only know that I didn’t do any differently when I was using High Sierra and had no issues that I’m encountering after going over to Catalina.

Yesterday, could suddenly see the pics on my iPad Air2 on the iMac but not those from my iPhone 8 !!!

Not sure what will happen today.

Discovery Channel !

Apple doesn’t seem to care !

Updated my iPad Air 3 to 13.6.1. Toggled off Photos Sync, checked removed photos from my device, toggled Photo Sync back on and performed sync to my iMac.

My thoughts in prior posts concerning Key Photos in People and using Photos in Contacts have proven incorrect, as I can see some albums that follow my thoughts and others that do not. I'm at a loss.

This sync with the update, many of the albums that previously showed "Syncing..." completed successfully. I still have some albums displaying "Syncing..." and haven't researched.

At this point I give up. We're the ones that are trying to use the Apple previously working features to their fullest and doing the troubleshooting for them. I would expect this to have been solved completely before the release of Big Sur. What other issues will we face with that release?

Just buy the 2TB cloud - it is what they want you to do - not interested in sorting it.

I'm out of here, but can't stop the post coming. Some great helpful stuff on this forum on other things but after 80 pages of complaints and hope it is obvious Photos does not work. Move on and stop posting that you have found a fix - YOU HAVEN'T.

Went through and curated and deleted five-hundred old photos, imported some new photos, and re-sync'd again today, and I'm back to not seeing the new photos being copied over again. The old photos I deleted on macOS weren't deleted on iOS either. It's absolute madness that Catalina and iOS 13 have been out for almost a year now, and still I can't sync photos reliably at this point. And, even if photos do manage to sync, my MacBook gets set on fire with CPU usage.