Massive problems using macOS 10.15 Catalina's Finder to sync to iOS 13.1.2 (on iOS: all sync'd photos duplicated, some photos show up as gray rectangles, some photos of people are missing, can't search for people, tags, or titles)

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Level 1

16 points

Massive problems using macOS 10.15 Catalina's Finder to sync to iOS 13.1.2 (on iOS: all sync'd photos duplicated, some photos show up as gray rectangles, some photos of people are missing, can't search for people, tags, or titles)

Catalina's Finder seems to be duplicating photos on my iPhone X running iOS 13.1.2. It sort of worked the first time, but photos were missing on iOS (and still are after the duplication). Finder sync'd the "People" albums from macOS to iOS, but various photos were missing even though all of the people seemed to be there.

Searching is still busted as it has been since 2012 or so. I can't search for people, titles or tags. Every time I ask about this, there's some handwaving by Apple and mention of iCloud. I don't really want to sync 25,000 photos over iCloud. For me, the entire Photos situation has been a disaster since iPhoto was deprecated. I manually entered the names of people in my photos twice. Once on macOS and again on iOS, and then the new iOS obliterated my manual naming around iOS 11. There seems to be some machine learning thing running on iOS, but it only found ten people that it can't recognize despite me entering their names on both macOS and iOS independently (and despite people at Apple saying I need iCloud syncing for search to work, but if that's the case why isn't the "People" just disabled on iOS). Titles and tags continue to NOT be searchable on iOS for some reason. All of this used to work up until 2013 or so...

iPhone X

Posted on Oct 11, 2019 3:42 PM

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Answer 1

hoyhoy Author

Level 1

16 points

Oct 20, 2019 9:14 AM in response to dlfaldfldfldl

iPhoto has been deprecated for years. By folders do you mean albums? Syncing mostly worked on Mojave except for the other problems I mentioned where Photos metadata wouldn’t sync. That’s been broken ever since 10.9.

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Answer 2

Dec 29, 2019 5:08 AM in response to hoyhoy

I hear you, hoyhoy, I have the same problem. I have just under 20,000 photos and 250 videos organized into albums in the Photos app on Mac (10.15.2). I appears to still be processing the People content but Activity Monitor suggests the photoanalysisd processes is largely inactive. There are only a few people that it seems to want to do more work on.

When I sync all photos and videos over to my iPhone 11 Pro (13.3) I get *some* duplicates in some of the folders. It's not all of them in the folder and not all folders contain duplicates. Just plain weird. Changing the sync option for Photos to "selected albums" and then selecting them all -- except for a problem folder with duplicates -- and repeating the sync seems to eliminate the problem. I have to sync twice -- once to remove the entire album with dups and then again after ticking the album box to sync back to the device. After that, the duplicates are gone. But what a pain to have to go through and identify the albums with duplicates in order to do this.

Also, it appears the People analysis has to be replicated on the actual iOS device. I don't get that. If the people have already been identified in Photos on macOS why not just port that already-determined identification over to iOS/iPadOS devices? I suppose there's a reason, but it also appears to have stalled on my iPhone and iPad.

When I view all Photos in iOS/iPadOS, there is a message at the bottom of the screen telling me how many photos and videos and that it is synching. And it has been telling me this for over 3 weeks despite me leaving the devices plugged in over night, locked, and quite a bit during the day, too.

Aggravating, to say the least.

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Answer 3

Dec 29, 2019 7:50 AM in response to gmdavis63

Clarification: On the above post from me, please kindly substitute "album" where I have used the word "folder."

As I've looked into this more today, it appears the duplicate picture situation on the i-devices might be related to geotagging. When I swipe between the duplicates on the i-devices, the top of the screen will display Date/Time information for one picture while the other pictures shows Date/Time/Location. This distinction is not replicated in the original Photos album from which the pictures originated on macOS -- meaning there isn't a duplicate situation going on where two identical pictures are only different because of the metadata. The picture that is present in the macOS Photos app has Date/Time/Location information along with other metadata.

The "all photos" views within the iPad/iOS Photos apps show overall counts that are significantly different from the macOS Photos app. The numbers are higher on the i-devices and both of them indicate they are syncing. Similarly, when I navigate into an album on an i-device there will be some duplicates (but not every picture is a duplicate) and scrolling to the bottom of the pictures within the album will also reveal the "Syncing. . . " message. The higher counts on the i-devices seem to reflect all of the duplicates that exist within the albums. And again, for clarity, these duplicates do not exist in the macOS Photos app albums which are the source for the sync.

If I wait 3 or 4 or more weeks for all of this syncing to finish, I wonder, will the duplicate situation resolve itself?

Also, it's probably relevant to note that I do not have iCloud photos fully enabled. It is enabled for Shared Albums only.

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Answer 4

hoyhoy Author

Level 1

16 points

Dec 31, 2019 10:36 AM in response to gmdavis63

The only thing that sort of works for me now is to disable photo syncing in Finder, sync click remove (this DOES NOT remove all the sync'd photos on iOS ANOTHER BUG). Then, remove "~/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/iPod\ Photo\ Cache", enable photo sync in finder again, and resync. After that, I'll usually get a fully sync'd library with no duplicates on iOS Photos. But, like you, I have 20,000 photos, and now the whole syncing process takes about three to four hours! And, the last time I did this, I wound up with one picture in my library from 2005 that was timestamped with the current time. There are so many problems with sync-ing now, I doubt they're ever going to fix it. I think the fundamental algorithm that they're using for sync-ing two directories is broken at a fundamental level.

It's absolutely unconscionable that Apple would release iOS and macOS in this state. I've never even really posted to the discussions before and have been a long term Apple customer since 2005. This whole ordeal is making me think that Apple just phoning it in at this point. The Apple Photos / iPhoto situation has never been great. iPhoto was OK, but the UI looked like it was designed by a four year old. The Photos UI actually looks good, but it's got some huge problems with geotagging and other weird usability problems that iPhoto didn't have. For instance if you delete a photo and hit the arrow button, the selector moves to the first photo in your library... 20,000 photos backwards in my case. Individual photo deletions on macOS Photos seems to take up to five seconds now. It's a hellish experience attempting too curate a large photo library now.

I'm so angry at this point I'm seriously thinking about dropping Apple products altogether. It's like they actively hate their customers now. I've never seen Apple release something so defective before.

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Answer 5

Oct 18, 2019 7:48 AM in response to hoyhoy

I've had similar issues syncing photos to the iphone. The problem I encountered is that iPhoto folders with subfolders on the mac will not transfer to the phone. Stand alone folders will.

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