Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

I finally gave up and lost the war with Apple.

I purchased 200 GB of space from iCloud and uploaded my entire 70 GB photo library. It took 5 days to upload. And it works perfectly now. All my albums, albums in folders, in short everthing in my Mac Photos app library transfered to all of my devices. My iPhone and iPad is now showing photo folders. It wasn't possible before.

The lack of a solution to the problem in recent Catalina and iOS/iPadOS updates shows me, Apple intentionally disrupted sync process from computer to devices. Apple did this to force customers to buy more iCloud space.

Despite the situation, it’s not apocalypse. iCloud Photos is a decent system. If I had not had such this bad experience, perhaps I would never have thought of switching to iCloud Photos.

In this sense, maybe Apple has even done me a favor ;)

Hello again all,

I have mentioned this before in my posts, but if you're so inclined you might want to try an external box from Synology.

I use a Synology box called the DS216+II, I have it set-up on my network but you can use it as a USB device as well. While this will not allow you to have pictures on your iPhone or iPad, it will allow you to connect to it and view all of the images via Synology's application, Photo Station.

I have been using this solution for about 4 years now and it works perfectly. It allows folder and sub folders, and as someone who has tens of thousands of images it is a far superior product vs Photos.

And while I understand that some may not want to invest the extra $, in my humble opinion, it's better to invest it in a box for your home then on $ for Apple's iCloud, because who knows how long before Apple breaks iCloud as well.

I have attached a SS of how my folder structure is created, so I do hope that helps some of you out there determine if it's time for a change.

And finally, Synology's Tech-Support is awesome, real people, real solutions.

Good Luck All!

Does anyone else have this issue occurring in conjunction with photos not syncing correctly? My phone also has the “syncing.....” showing. It’s been a week since I last synced my phone to my Mac. Even after the photo count stopped climbing and I had left the device attached overnight, it still shows this way.

Also, as another data point, when I do a new synch and I watch this number on my phone, it actually slowly ticks down to zero and then increases as if the entire phone is first wiped and then reloaded. I can’t imagine that is how the process should work.

Is this in German. I can read what your albums are. Have you made any separate albums containing your photos. I'm attaching a screen shot of what I get in Finder when my phone is attached. Everything under Photo Stream starting with Fireworks is actually under the heading My Albums in the Photos App and there are more but I couldn't scroll down & take a Screen Shot.

My sync problems have caused me to give up until the next update, but another interesting thing is the bar at the bottom of the sync window;

this is my iPad Pro when on it the system shows this:

clearly another indication of the issue....

Here are two screenshots from my computer. The first is how you should see the list in the Photos App; the second is what you will see when you look at Finder & click on your phone. The actual heading of "My Albums" does not show in find, just the albums themselves show.

How that this helps.

Photo App

Finder With Phone Connected

Correct, I am aware of iTunes is now called Music on Catalina (10.15.2). I’m just not used to calling it Music yet. Ok, I’m going to follow your instructions right now, and see if this works....

Wow, I actually got it to work... Sweet! Thanks @Bru55

It’s very simple actually... Just drag the albums you want synced from ‘Photos’ to your iPad or iPhone, out of their folder in ‘Photos’ and put them directly under ‘My Albums’. Screen shot attached shows my 3 albums I dragged from the folder ‘Personal Photo Events’ and put them under “My Albums’: Peppy’s Album; Favorites Album; Instagram Posts & Affirmations

Then just sync and they pop up. FINALLY!!!! Good job @Bru55 👍🏼

@Bru55 ich bin auch Schweizer :-)

Bei mir erscheinen die Alben nicht im Sync Fenster im Finder. Nichts nada, es sieht aus wie ein leeres Fotos anstatt wie mein Fotos aus welchem ich auswählen könnte. Er erkennt weder Alben noch Personen.

Here you go and every time I open it all my selections are reset, which is really annoying, too. I wish I could just go back to what worked. The only photos that sync are the ones at the root of the Photos library as the first message in this thread indicates. I'm not taking all of my photos out of their respective folders to accommodate a bug.

I think the clean sync is the critical thing, though until the new iOS mine still did not have those essential subfolders, I think it is a combination to solve it. This is what I have now on both devises with a clean sync this eve (by cable) :)

On the mac Photos, note with folders & sub folders

On the devices they are now listed in order, though the main folder name format is not there the sub folders are (plus in the right order). That is what I was after anyway. I included a couple of ones easy to identify on the menu, but in reality they are all there & there are many. Under from my mac.

wish you the best with this.

Hey everyone,

I'm having this problem too and it's really annoying. It's been like this since iOS 13 and Catalina but worked well when it was iOS 12.4 and Mojave. I spent 5 hours with Apple telephone support and they couldn't solve it either and didn't know about it, apparently. I've reported this constantly since October, at least.

So basically, when my iPhone syncs it duplicates some or all of my pictures so I go from 10,000 to 20,000+ and 75GB storage taken up on my phone.

However, what it does is, it takes ALL of my photos off every time I sync, so I cant just import one photo and sync, it takes everything off and then it has to curate again each time.

What also happens as well is, the iPhone doesn't finish the sync process, it just freezes and does nothing.

I've literally done a fair bit and with the help of Apple support. Set up iPhone and Laptop as new, created new library and synced on a new admin account, reset the NVRAM / SMC and much more. Tested different cables too and just can't seem to get it to work

Does anyone have this problem? All my photos 'sync' but they all get taken off my phone and put back on, all 10,500 of them but I have loads of duplicates so its near to 20,000. It's annoying because I have to curate all my photos again over night

This isn't a fix comment but more of a time frame, it started for myself with the iOS 13 and macOS Catalina betas in the summer and I first filed a log on 29/06/2019.

From there on it's happened on the below dates which are my logs to Apple to report it,

06/07/2019

19/07/2019

31/08/2019 ** See Screen shot included

20/09/2019

03/10/2019 - iPhone Failing to Sync

11/10/2019

18/10/2019 - iPhone Failing to Sync

28/10/2019 - Photos Stuck Syncing

07/11/2019 - Photos Stuck Syncing

11/11/2019

23/11/2019 - Duplicates

Stopped Reporting it Here...

05/01/2020

25/01/2020

The ** is for the screen shot below, I only have around 10,000 photos but it went absolutely mad that day and wouldn't stop

Also, I know betas aren't the most stable things but just to note as well, once the beta for that version was over I would do a fresh install of the software

"possibly fixes" doesn't sound that optimistic 😄

I have found a workaround though. It's a little cumbersome but you can create a Smart Album and point that to the Album that's nested under a folder. Then you Sync the smart album. It works, it's probably not the answer if you have a lot of folders that you want to sync to your device but it does work.

Bad news for me... I updated my 2015 iMac 5k to Mac OS Catalina 10.15.4 + my iPhone 7 Plus to iOS 13.4 Not sure if it’s because of the older iPhone, but nothing has changed for me. All I’m trying to do is sync these four albums onto my iPhone 7 Plus (total of 1394 photos). Nothing has changed since I updated both devices, this afternoon. The four albums sync but only 1055 photos within these 4 albums show up, which means I’m missing 339 photos). I got the same results w the sync before the updates today, so nothing has changed for me. Might be the older iPhone, that’s causing the problem. If I was a professional photographer, I would of did away w Apple. I use to love Aperture and they did away w that App too. #disgraceful 👎🏼