Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

USB sync to both my iPad and iPhone now work. It's taken me awhile to figure it out but here is what is critically important:

1. You must have the SUPPLEMENTAL update to Mac OS 10.15.4 installed on your Mac.
2. Your iOS and/or PadOs version must be updated to 13.4.1
3. You must perform a repair/rebuild of your Mac Photos library.
4. If you have any corrupt photo files in your library, you have to delete those and replace them with photos from your backup.
5. You must have sufficient storage space on your iDevice.

When you perform a USB sync, it is important to know that when the finder has finished the sync process your iDevice has not. It continues to unpack, organize, and store your pics into folders. In my case 14,300 photos took about 45 minutes to complete the unpacking process on my iPhone Xr.

At the end of the day, USB sync is working on my iPad pro and iPhone Xr. It only took Apple 7 months to get here but now it works.

Thanks! A couple of questions:

1. How do I know I have corrupt photo files in my library? I did the Library rebuild many times and it seems to finish the process correctly.
2. What happens on further synchs, after adding some new pictures to the library? Does the sync takes long, synching again the complete library? Or is the process quite fast, as it used to be with iTunes before Catalina? No sync errors (duplicates and black boxes)?

Thanks for the feedback!

What I can tell you is that I could solve all of my problems by doing the following:

• syncing the whole photos library to icloud (you may have to pay for it for a month), this may take a while
• have a look at icloud.com if all stuff is there (for me it was)
• switch off the icloud syncing on my macOS device (so all the data is on icloud only)
• delete the whole photo library file in ~/Photos (definitely make a backup before)
• switch on the icloud syncing again
• wait a long time while all the data from iCloud is copied to your macOS system
• witch off icloud syncing again, unsubscribe from the iCloud storage
• have a brand new Photo library with the new format introduced in macOS 10.15
• local sync to my iOS devices via USB cable using Finder now worked without a problem

No idea if this is also working for you, but for me it did. Please backup all of your data before doing the above. I mentioned that inside my Photo library a lot of old folders exist, which were no longer there after doing the above. So I used the (probably unbuggy) sync to iCloud to fresh up my local Photo library. Since this no sync problems occur, even in nested folders.

Good luck!

Markus

I gave up :-(

When trying to sync photos from Finder to iPad/iPhone, one or several of the following happens:

1. No sync at all
2. Syncing all my 14.000+ photos ... and I found 28.000 on my iPad/iPhone
3. Syncing seem to work (at least, I see it working at it last the usual several hours) ... I cannot see any of the albums ... but in "Locations" I see all photos, with all thumbnails ... but klicking on photo(s) does not show any photo. Waiting for hours (to maybe allow the iPad/iPhone to do some internal stuff) does not help.
4. What always works are the following steps: a. Delete all photos (by unclicking the photo-sync in Finder, and b. re-sync.
5. Never, never ever, only the new or changed photos are synced. Always either all or nothing.
6. In all of the above cases, except "no sync at all", the Persons collection is reseted. And iPad/iPhone start to rebuild it - with all my manual input lost.

My systems are the up-to-date: MacBookPro 2018 with newest Catalina, iPhone and iPad with newest IOS.

I decided to switch to iCloud for my photos:

• Adding (new, changed) photos by drag&drop an my MacBook into iCloud-Photos on Safari
• Syncing from iCloud to iPad/iPhone works

So - Apple managed to achieve the desired result: A new paying customer for iCloud storage.

Is it fair or serious: No.

Kind regards. Michael

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. :(

Same Apple-Shame here.

The last syncs get different results each. The Photos.App on the iMac shows always a correct amount of pictures. But on iPad Pro and iPhoneX its like....here the numbers form the last days:

• iMac (Photos.app): 33'835 (correct number)
• iPad Pro 12,8": 23'581>sync>39'979>sync>39'979>sync>25'979>sync>48'718>sync>37'079>sync>25'591>sync>29'831
• iPhoneX: 40'164>sync>38'2719>sync>26'428>sync>31'880>sync>29'630>sync>22'008>sync>19'089>sync>44'507

I mean, its like playing roulette in Las Vegas. It is such a shame that a company like Apple is not able to deliver a software which simply syncs albums (=folders) from an Apple device to another Apple device. They don't have the technology, they have software engineers who are not able to do this, this is the state of the art of Apple software technology. It's Tim Cook's Apple, not Steve Jobs' Apple.

Good news.

I have been reading and posting here since the thread started. Ignored most of the post in the last 6 months as many people claimed there was a fix, while others simply didn’t understand the problem or was talking about something else like cloud sync issues instead. I just kept ignoring all the thread notifications.

Saw Nogee43’s reply above, and it has motivate me to confirm the following. With the latest iOS update (13.6) and OSX (10.15.6):

• Albums no longer need to be in root level [that was fixed a while ago],
• No more duplicate photos being synced (usually one with all the metadata, and one with missing metadata like geo-tags, etc.) [this was also fixed sometime go],
• The problems where incremental album syncs (I.e. selecting an additional album to sync) would render whatever was previously synced at the iDevice being messed up (e.g. missing or duplicate photos) is no longer a problem. This fix happened with the recent software updates. This means, you no longer have to unsync everything before doing an incremental album sync,

However, and I believe this aims directly at Nogee43’s observations:

• It seems 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. You have to reset the faces on your Mac and let Photos rebuild the faces before you name the faces again, but you can NEVER pick your own KEY PHOTO (unless it is from an album you won’t be syncing).
• Which means, the fix is to create an “dummy” album you will never sync to your device, which contain photos you intend to use as key photos for the faces you have identified. Of course, you don’t even need to do this step if you don’t ever pick your own key photos. (Just to be safe, I made sure the photos in this dummy album aren’t links to the same photo from another album you will sync. I actually created a duplicate of photos I wish to use as key photos using screen capture and importing them into the library)

With the above, all my sync problems have now gone away.

There might be other things I’ve done in the past that could have rendered my success unique and non-replicable (such has having repaired and manually rebuilt the whole Photo library on my Mac from scratch a few updates ago), but I doubt it. Nogee43, please try and see if you have selected any key photos for people you have identified, and these photos are also in the incomplete albums you’re trying to sync.

Which brings me to (if the above is proven correct) the last problem of incomplete syncs should be an iOS problem, specifically with the key photos under People potentially conflicting between those from OSX and iOS.

Apple (or God), if you’re reading this, please look into it.

MusicMat_AT,

I didn’t go for option 1 as I wanted to specify what photos to use for key photo.

So I went for option 2 instead.

To be extra carousel, I decided to create a screen-grabbed dummy album of all the faces I wanted to use as key photos, independent of rest of the “real” library. This album is not to be synced.

My specific steps were (on the Mac of course):

• screen grab all faces you want to use,
• create dummy album
• import theses screen-grabs into the dummy album
• wait hours for photos to scan, until it lets you name these grabbed faces in this dummy album. BUT DON’T LABEL THEM JUST YET
• Now go back to your people folder
• temporarily rename all the people there to an unused name (eg. Jack Black to JB, Jill White to JW...) ]ie you are basically removing their names]
• Go back to dummy album and name the grabbed faced to their real names (eg Jack Black, Jill White......)
• Go back to People album, and you should see doubles of everyone their: Jack Black, JB, Jill White, JW.....)
• Merge (drag and drop) JB to Jack Black, JW to Jill White, and so on.

You should now have a people album where the key photos are all from the newly imported grabs sourced from the dummy album, while the rest of the photos are from the real library.

try syncing

you should no longer experience incomplete albums on your device.

let me know if it works

Finally solved this after 2 weeks:

1. Updated Mac Mini to Catalina 10.15.7
2. Updated both iPad and iPhone to iOS 14.0.1
3. On iOS devices, Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings

After the reset, my albums showed on the Finder - iOS devices - Photos and I could sync my photos to them again!

I absolutely agree and confirm the same problems. This is absoltely unserious from Apple.

And there is more:

1. MacOS is not able to sync my iTunes Music Library correctly to my recent iPhone 11Pro. All cover pictures of my albums are wrong. iTunes messes up the covers randomly, so my fantastic Michael Petrucciani Trio in Tokyo Album shows the Cover Picture of a boring Noa Album, Bob Marley's "I shot the sheriff" is shown as cover picture for a Pablo Casals Cello Suites album. Apple Sotware Engineers are apparently amaterus.
2. Since I updated one of my Macs (I use 3-4 different ones covering different places and rules I have as professor and a creative professional) to MacOS 10.15.7 Catalina, my different claendars in the calendar.app are showing different colors and not the ones I did in my setup of the App (Calendar.App Syncs with Office 365/Exchange). If I change the colors with my custom colors, exiting the menu the colors turn back in MacOS basic colors, often with a bizzarre logic (Green to Violet, Brown to Orange).
3. In 2 Years Apple was not able to provide a SIMPLE (!!!!) Photos.App Sync that is working correctly. I think this is due to the fact that Apple wants you 1. to buy iCloud Space and Sync with iCloud (but even that doesn't work correctly!), 2. Apple wants to sort your private pictures in their way and not in your way, so they can have of what's going on...they offer you self-generated presentations and sortings in which a professional is not interested.
4. Apple Mail is not able to handle my Helvetica New Light preset for Emails. Helvetica New is shown as fat "standard" font and I have to manually change in the Fonts Menu the font to the "Light" option to have my mails looking how i want.
5. iOS is getting worse and worse, loosing completely the particular Apple-Appeal i apreciated from 1988 to 2018...

[Edited by Moderator]

I have checked and tried. Basically syncing photos from Mac to iPhone and iPad via Finder does not function on Catalina.

Am on OS version 10.15.1, on iPhone 13.2.3, on iPad

The following attachments show my attempt to sync an album using Finder. After clicking on which album to sync, have tried nested and in root album directory, the tic is removed when closing and opening finder window again briefly after.

What worked for me is the following...

Create a Smart Album where "Photo is referenced"

I found all the pictures that are not being uploaded there.

then I selected all of them and did file > consolidate

then things started magically working.

I think it has to do with any pictures that you don't have saved in the "Photos" directory? Like if you import images from some other location it doesn't know how to deal with that.

Anyway, that worked for me so hopefully this will help someone else.

I made a Smart Album as shown below matching the name of the Smart Album to the name of the existing sub folder album. See the two screen shots below. So I was able to replicate a sub folder in my Travel Folder (Buenos Aires . . . ) in a top level Smart Album of the same name (or anything else you want to name it)

apparently Apple Releases macOS Catalina 10.15.2..

I wonder if this may fix the issues we are having? (again, reminding that this thread is in regards to Albums located in Folders, are not being sync'd. i ended up going back to Mojave, which has taken me weeks to do so, but if any of you wanted to see if the update fixes things? Interestingly though, the keyword below "newly" created folders, so probably getting hopes up on this one. Funny thing, i don't recall anyone complaining about these issues below, yet, they are fixed ?

Can you please further explain this? I'm going to upload 60.000+ photos and need to organize them. I have all of them saved and organized on a HHD and be ready to import. By taking this structure as in the picture, which folder are going to be synchronized?