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Level 1

89 points

Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Im using Mac OS Catalina 10.15, I have my photos on the Photos App, (I do not use iCloud photos).

To sync the photos, I connect the iPad to the Mac, open Finder (Since iTunes is gone), select the iPad from (locations) go to the right and click on Photos, select the albums and then hit sync. All the photos are not synced and apparently it syncs the albums under the root "My Albums" but is not able to sync the albums that are inside a folder.

Mac Pro

Posted on Oct 8, 2019 3:04 PM

Best reply

dervatii Author

Level 1

89 points

Posted on Mar 24, 2020 8:36 PM

Hello All!

After almost 6 months this is finally solved.

Today updating to Mac OS Catalina 10.15.4 it worked with the following devices:

iphone 11 pro iOS 13.4
ipad ProiOS 13.4

Thanks for all that commented and try to help!

I hope it works for everyone!

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1,236 replies

hans-h.

Level 1

4 points

Nov 14, 2020 4:12 AM in response to Thamya88

not working for me with Big Sur and iOS 14.2 - it appears to sync successfully, but many photos are missing on iPad and iPhone (the "black tiles").

I tried typical remedies (SMC & PRAM reset, repairing photos library, deleting all photos on iOS and new sync) - did not help either. Needless to say: I am disappointed, yet not surprised any more...

SimsWay

Level 1

4 points

Nov 14, 2020 4:58 AM in response to dervatii

I can confirm too. Big Sur did NOT solve the issue. Really same problem as usual.

Is there a way we can get Apple's attention? Someone here on this board must know somebody to get this going, like somebody in the news media world?

How in the F world can Apple F this up so long is beyond me. Can't even do a simple copy/paste task right......

hoyhoy

Level 1

16 points

Nov 24, 2020 11:40 AM in response to ilyashakan

The latest Catalina (and now Big Sur) are 99% working for me, but I still have a small number of photos showing up as black squares on iOS. The syncing issue don't seem totally solved, but the situation is much, much better than it was before 10.15.6 (and now 11.0.1). I had to fully resync from macOS 10.15.6 to iOS 13.7 before my problems were resolved. Still, even under macOS 11.0.1 and iOS 14.2, weird syncing problems exist. Finder seems to be syncing a thousand music tracks for no apparent reason when nothing has changed, and a small number of photos don't appear on iOS. Oh, and photo searching still doesn't work iOS when you sync with a cable, but I think that's a _feature_ to force you to pay for iCloud.

Jan 8, 2021 8:12 AM in response to dervatii

I'd agree that Big Sur has made it better. I have about 18k photos and there used to be almost 2k photos that went from syncing to not syncing once this problem started. During all that free time in December I went through every album comparing my iPad and iPhone to Photos and found many photos that were not syncing. In each case I did a conversion of the photo from JPEG (which most of my older photos were) to HEIF and then they'd sync. If the non-syncing photo was already HEIF (and there were very few of those) I could do an edit on them and afterward they'd sync. After all that work I"m down to about 30 photos that don't sync. Can't find them in albums. Even created a Smart Album for photos that aren't in albums. All of this while still on Catalina. Updated to Big Sur and didn't lose any pictures through syncing.

It sure seems like some selection algorithms changed back in the past when this all of a sudden cropped up (a couple of Mac OS and IOS versions back). Not sure Mac OS or IOS should decide which ones get synced. If I have a picture in Photo and I've told the IOS device to sync it in Finder, it should sync. So right now the problem isn't getting any worse, but....