Mac Os Catalina do not sync photos with iOS Devices

Hey all.... I haven’t been reading any of these latest posts on this thread, for over a month now, so I’m not sure where everyone is at, in regards to this major glitch. However, I have some good news here. Apparently, Apple is 100% aware of this issue, and they have senior advisors that are reading this forum, amongst other forums, regarding this photos issue, so they’re seeing everyone’s posts and comments.

A senior advisor contacted me, after reading a few of my comments here on this forum, and I spent a good 3 hours with him on the phone. We detected the main problem, and spent some time addressing the issue. Everything here on my end, is now working perfectly with no glitches at all... No missing photos (not even 1), no duplicates, no blacked out images, etc... My main issue was, each album that was being synced from the Photos App on my 2015 iMac 5k, to my iPhone7 Plus, was missing around 10-15% of the photos. That problem not longer exists.

The solution the senior advisor found out was, the photos library folder was damaged, and needed to be fully repaired. We did a screen share on my iMac and iPhone and worked our way through repairing the original photos library folder. Once we did that, we restarted the computer in ‘safe boot mode’ (Restarting the computer, while holding down the ‘Shift’ key, until you see the Apple logo, then release the ‘Shift’ key). Simple as that... So far, so good... Let u know, if it starts glitching out again. Hope this works for most of you here.

Screen shot below: (New - updated) folder is the repaired one.

I don't have those devices, an X and an oldish Ipad Air2 and it's not fixed for those.

Atrocious software, very reminiscent of Windows in its worst iterations

I find it does work from "My Albums" but only with a random number of pictures, say 2 from 39 or 1 from 15. I note while in the photo inspection window for the device clicking an album away reduces the audio bar and the photos bar. Delete more albums and the audio bar stays the same even to the point of deleting all albums, but the photo bar remains the same width

I'm no expert, but it this allocation of memory on the device to albusm, considering all the albums at root are there but with a tiny number of pictures. Easy to copy all photos but the number in the albums stays the same at very few.

Note the purple bar shrank a little when the first album was unticked so too the orange photo bar, delete all ticks, no change evident

Using Catalina Ver 10.15.6

Still unable to see pictures/photos when I hook up my iPhone 8 Plus to my iMac

Had no problems with High Sierra.

As there are only blanks, I am unable to see the pictures to sync

I tried syncing the blank picture, it seems to work !

But why am I not seeing the actual pictures ?

Anyone with this experience ?

The good news is -- macOS to iOS syncing seems to be working now for me after completely deleting my "People" album on macOS and it's been working for about a week now when re-syncing. I did a bunch of other things over the past few months as well though...

I was getting syncing errors on certain video files off old cameras like the Canon S200. I deleted what I didn't want and combined related small clips into single files and encoded them as MP4 files with iMovie and ffmpeg. That managed to solve the video syncing errors.

The latest thing that I did was go through my music collection that has been piling-up since 1997 and fixed all the album art and metadata. Finder wasn't syncing _most_ of the album art for some reason and flagging various errors. For some tracks, I had to delete the the files from Apple Music and then re-add them for the new album art to show up. More Catalina bugs! There are so many bugs with Catalina to iOS 13 syncing on the latest releases.

Oh, and I ran into yet another iOS 13.6.1 Apple Photos bug yesterday as well. If you delete an entire photo burst, you can't remove it from the "Recently Deleted" album manually no matter what you do. I even went into "General" -> "iPhone Storage" and cleared the recently deleted photos there as well. Nothing works. That bug has existed since iOS 13 was released. Still not fixed and iOS 14 is about to drop. What are they thinking? It's crazy the number of bugs that still exist in iOS 13 right now.

As I was typing this, a big ~20k photos sync completed, and it looks to be correct with no duplicates or blank photos. Not sure why it has to copy the entire library over when I only imported six photos from iOS to macOS though. My music imported correctly again on today's sync (via a lightning cable) as well. Not sure why Finder has to copy ~20k photos when I only imported six from iOS to macOS and resync'd though. 🙃

I spent over fifty hours (re)-curating my Photos and deleting regrettable and blurry photos and videos and another thirty hours curating my digital music. Everything is in much, much better shape now though. It was a good exercise to go konmari the heck out of my photos and music. I also replaced quite a few music tracks with remastered or higher-quality encoding. I basically replaced all of the album art manually because most of what was there was in 300x300 format (or worse!), and a lot of the music I have is custom-encoded stuff from my tape-trading-by-snail-mail days.

The bigger project I considered was just starting anew with Apple Music, Apple Photos, and iOS. I'm definitely starting with a new iOS 14 this year rather than restoring from a backup as I have been doing since 2008.

In fact, I did start with a new Catalina install on a new MacBook this year _without_ restoring from a Time Machine backup using the Migration Assistant, but that didn't help my syncing woes because since I just imported my legacy Photos and iTunes music libraries that had been accumulating since 2005 (and the files themselves have been accumulating since the mid-'90's!) manually from a Time Machine backup off my old MacBook.

I can't imagine a normal Apple user going through these extreme steps to make things work though. It's crazy that Catalina was released in this state and never fixed for an entire year. I've never seen Apple release anything like this before.

Even though macOS is syncing my photos to iOS now via finder, AMPDevicesAgent is burning through power and CPU on my MacBook Pro like CRAZY. My laptop is very hot to the touch. How much power are we burning through here to sync six photos? I literally imported six photos off my phone to my mac, deleted them off my phone, and then resync'd them. This took about an hour and burned through enough electricity to make my laptop incredibly hot!

Why does Finder need to copy 19,000+ photos when only six photos should need to be copied?

I just tried another sync with iOS 13.7 and 10.15.6. It's still re-copying music and photos for no apparent and burning my CPU to the ground. Again, I imported 12 photos from iOS to macOS Photos and sync'd, and it's now been 2.5hrs and the sync isn't finished yet. It's been eleven months since iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 were released, AND I STILL CAN'T SYNC MY PHOTOS OR MUSIC!

Finder has been stuck like this for several hours. No status. No ETA on completion.

I'm glad you informed them, it's hard for me to be optimistic though, since they never fixed the sync problem with the last version of iTunes, and the only way I could sync was to install an earlier version. I assumed that they didn't fix it because they were working on Catalina. Silly me.

Yes, I certainly hope so too. I was just saying I am not hopeful because they did not fix the sync issue a few months ago when I (and others) reported it.

I hope I am wrong! I like the idea of using Finder to sync - but it has to WORK!! 😉 Fingers crossed!

I am having the same issue on both of my iOS devices - iPad Pro & iPhone 11 Pro - I originally had 20,000 photos on my iPad Pro that were all removed after my first Catalina 10.15 sync via Finder on my iMac 5K and I attempted to sync a photo album to my iPhone 11 Pro and it wouldn't work and in fact by the end of the sync the "checked" album was "unchecked."  All the albums were inside Folders so I'm assuming that is the culprit. I tried the same with my iPad Pro and same exact problem. A sync test after moving one of the photo albums out from a Folder and directly placing it under “My Albums” has worked for me as a temporary fix on the iPad Pro.  But it’s SLOW - a basic backup and sync with nothing new on iPad, just a few minutes after the last backup and sync is taking 45 minutes. I have 32GB of ram on this iMac 5K - so that should not be an issue.

I've exactly the same problem (Catalina 10.15 and iOS/iPadOS 13.1.2)

I don't know if this is an iOS or MacOS issue, but it seems to be an error with folders and Photos in Catalina.

I hope Apple will correct this issue soon...

I am experiencing exactly the same issue. Syncing albums in folders used to work fine under Mojave and iTunes.

Crazy that Apple wouldn't catch this! How else would you organize a library with over 25000 photos?!

I've submitted a bug report to Apple, hopefully they can fix this soon.

I sympathise. I have this problem, too, and I am struggling to see one significant benefit of Catalina! It's a terrible downgrade. Apple should be ashamed! But will there be an apology? Never! The word is not in Apple's vocabulary.

I raise a big report too. Encourage everyone to keep doing this.

The symptoms of the problems I experienced is exactly the same as discussed above - no syncing for albums organized under folders, same issue faced with Apple TV (no syncing there also), previously checked albums becomes unchecked once sync fails to complete.

Yep I am having the same problem in Catalina with my iPad Pro 11" padOS 1.3 and iphone8Plus on ios 1.3

Albums in the root can sync to the device, Albums embedded in folders do not Sync when selected. Clearly a Bug that should have been tested