Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Since page two on this thread, I said, Apple senior or executive, blah blah blah. They don't care and treat us like garbage.

They care about emoji and more emoji.

The only way to sync is to create a new folder for photos at photos on finder.

And the same for videos.

And after that, you can sync it.

Of course, this is not the proper way but at least works for me on many devices.

Yes, on finder. Anywhere, but it is better in pictures.

Macintosh hd> Pictures>

After this step you can create the folder you prefer.

For example:

Macintosh hd> Pictures>iPhone Photos>

And you can create any folder.

After that you can choose it from iTunes which folders you can sync.

The same action for videos too in Movies folder.

Works like charm. The main disadvantage is it takes the double space if you have the photos in photos app on Mac.

I hope this was helpful.

Apple does not treat us as customer anymore.

spiranhas

Your method describes what is SUPPOSED to happen, but it doesn't always work properly. Please see my thread here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250927454

I have been waiting for months for a solution (I had an earlier thread as well, and a pre-Catalina thread, all are in my thread above).

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.

Update on my situation. After doing a full phone reinstall, my first sync worked fine but took forever. The count between the Mac photo library and those on the phone were very close. Upon second sync, duplicates of random photos appeared but the total photo count on the phone actually decreased. A third sync actually introduced more duplicates and in some cases triplicates. In all cases, I am just syncing the library as all photos with no sub folders. My photo library is stored on an external drive for space reasons as I have over 35,000 photos.

When comparing duplicates and triplicates that have appeared on red on the phone, oddly there are cases where one photo contains date and location metadata but the other does not. I’ve also noticed that in some cases the duplicate image is slightly difference in balance (color, contrast, etc). I have not edited any of these photos or created any duplicates. This only appears on the phone.

Also interesting is that since catalina, any photos that I add to a shared album from my Mac will appear in the shared album on all devices, but if I add photos from my phone or iPad, or if someone else adds photos, then they do not appear on my Mac.

Lastly, I have wondered if there is something weird happening in this whole sync process because of shared albums. In one instance, I noted that after a sync between my Mac and phone, that several photos from shared albums that I do not own but am just an invited member to appeared locally on my phone. These happened to be photos on which I commented. Very odd.

Ugh. Broken broken broken. I would never have bought a large volume phone if I knew I wouldn’t be able to use it for photos.

XX007

Since I don't use the Photos app, but use Finder, this may not help you. But in case it does - try this to get the photos off of your iPad. The "bin button" certainly won't work but there is a way around that. I learned this trick from this support forum!

Go to your iPad settings - Photos - and you'll see "iCloud Photos" - choose this. Your photos should start to delete themselves off of the iPad. Depending on how many photos you have, you might have to return to "settings" more than once (I go back and forth between the photos on my iPad and settings, takes a few minutes). They will eventually all leave the iPad. (I'm not talking about screenshots or photos you TOOK with your iPad).

If you want to sync through USB/ Finder at this point, delete the "iPod Photo Cache" from your Macbook. Then plug your iPad in and sync through Finder like you'd do if this whole mess hadn't happened. For my library of 30k+ photos this takes about 2 hours and I have to do it every time, with every device.

My thread about it is here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250927454

I hope this helps you regain space on your iPad anyway! 😀

Hi, I don’t use iCloud for photos (tried it and it made a horrible mess of everything I’d spent days sorting out) so now I use the photos app on Mac to sync photos to my iPhone 11 Pro. I have organised my photos into albums which are inside folders in the photos app. However, since Catalina, this just doesn’t work. The I have spent day’s trying different things with no joy and I was ready to launch the computer at the wall! But, I have found a work around whereby I created a new folder which I called MyPhotos (very original!) and I placed this folder in Pictures in Finder. Next I opened my photos app and dragged each album individually into the MyPhotos folder. When I connected my phone it asked where to sync photos from and I chose my newly created folder named MyPhotos. It took about two hours to sync but all my photos were there, displaying just as I originally organised them in the photos app. I realise this is not an ideal solution and Apple really do need to address this urgently but in the meantime this worked for me and hope it might work for others with a similar issue 😊

The cloud photos has ceased to work for me so it isn’t just sync that doesn’t work. iOS works well with photo but the cloud refuses to communicate with Catalina so my libraries are never aligned and apple have not dealt with this problem. Multiple posts on this.

Because of this.

They only care about profit and emojis.

Welcome to a new era.

After stopping late of 2018 back to my mac the next was this.

Say hello to the cloud.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/28/apple-1q-2020-results/

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/29/new-emojis-coming-in-2020/

Only customers located in USA can start actions to solve this. For us outside USA is just a joke to even try anything.

Yes the fix will be here in due time. Patience, patience patience. They have too many priority fixes to get to before they fix photo sync. I don't know how many of you were around when IOS 11 was released 2 plus years ago in September 2017. Very similar sync issues. You literally could not sync photo albums onto your iDevices. Apple finally fixed in mid April of 2018, a total of 7 months after iOS 11 came out. And it was a dual fix - iTunes and iOS 11. This time around they revamped by putting photo sync into Finder. One would think all they had to do was lift the code out of iTunes and drop it into the Finder code base. Why is this so difficult? Because they embark on huge re-writes of iOS and Mac OS EVERY year. It just isn't necessary. Make it simple! If you can't make the updates every year, then do it every other year. But for now.... patience, patience, patience. I'm betting on mid April for the fix.

I updated to Catalina 15.3 and IOS 13.3.1 and still no luck. Looks as though we may have to wait until version 16 as fixing this issue is proving to be very difficult.

My own view is that Apple has forgotten that to sync to an iDevice each photo needs to be optimised for the particular device since there is not point in syncing a 20 Mpx file to an iPhone with a 2MPx screen - you are just using and unnecessary amount of space on the phone. The Photos App on the Mac will tell you the file size (clicking on the circles i) but the photos app on the iPhone does not show file size information even though it is transmitted along with the picture. However if you instal an app on the phone called Exif viewer this information. The Apple agent I spoke to did not know this.

This I think is the fundamental problem that Apple is debating with itself - whether to have identical files on Mac and iPhone/Pad or whether to have an optimised version on the iDevice.

As for Lightroom I use this program and like it very much - like many on this thread I use LR for editing and Photos for syncing with my iPad.

Light room come in two versions Classic and "Normal". Classic is the more sophisticated version that I mainly, use copies of the edited file are kept on my Mac's HD. The "normal" version which is more basic in my view, keeps copies in Adobe's cloud. They will then appear on your iPad after you install the LR app. All of this (plus Photoshop) comes as part of Adobe's monthly subscription. It all works fine, except that I prefer LR classic,

The main bug bear I have with Apple is that if they have told us that syncing would no longer work, this is the route I would take for future work and I would not have tried to sync via finder which succeeded in removing all my photos from my iPad. Thus leaving me, like many others on this thread, with umpteen hours of work putting them all back either via LR or "shared albums" in the Photos app which requires a subscription to Apple's cloud.

Hope this makes sense.

Ipad just now synced perfectly with iPhotos too,...that is after deleting the old iPhoto events with a manual limited sync. I noticed the numbers were off on the menu ions for the folders, it said I had 1 photo for example in the folder, but when I opened it they were all there.

Seems we are close, I have both devices working syncing with my mac mini via the cable, I hope something here helps.

photoguy7: I can confirm that reverting to High Sierra completely fixed the problem. I successfully re-established all of my photos onto my iPhone (11) using iTunes. There are other problems, too, with Photos in Catalina, such as inability to generate thumbnails from nested folders. That works fine in Photos under High Sierra.

Of course, you need a backup of your old Photos library, since Catalina changes the library so it cannot be read by High Sierra, and I assume by Mojave. Luckily, in my case I had made a bootable backup of High Sierra before I upgraded to Catalina. I then booted from that, and used Disk utility to erase my computer hard drive and did a Restore from the external bootable drive. Hope this helps.... Eddie. PS... I am staying away from Catalina until this problem is 100% fixed.

I updated my iPad Pro, iPhone 11 both to iOS 13.4 and iMac to 10.15.4 yesterday.

Synced both iOS devices today via cord to iMac.

Added 2 albums (nested in Folders in Photos on my iMac) the two different Albums that had just pics in them (no vids) synced just fine as far as I can tell - the quantity of pics match on Photos on iMac and also on both iOS devices. However, the albums that had a combo of pics and videos - 1 album is missing 3 vids, the other album is missing 3 pics - one album has 137 items, the other has over 850 items.

No duplicates as far as I can tell - but will test this again after I add more pics or vids to the albums which is when I was seeing odd random duplicates on my iPad since Catalina.

Never had any of these issues prior to Catalina - I know others have complained prior to Catalina, but that has not been my experience.