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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
Hello,
I completely renovated my photos library on my Macbook Pro, where I manage my photos. Via iCloud, these changes are reflected on my iPhone, but not my iMac. Any thoughts on why it is not syncing? Can I reset my iMac's Photo's app to reflect the changes?
Thanks,
J
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Presumably you are correctly logged into your iCloud account and when you open preferences within Photos the button 'Use as system library' is greyed out and the iCloud tab is selected?
When you open Photos, click on library and when you scroll to the bottom of your photos on the left hand side, what message do you see 'still updated' or 'updated on xx'?
Hey Russ,
It took about 2.5 days to delete the redundant and low-res files, while connected to iCloud, so I'd find the behavior strange.
Additionally, I had initially used PhotoSweeper, a 3rd party app, to identify some of the duplicates. Photosweeper creates a folder outside of the Deleted files folder, so that may have contributed to the issue as well. I believe the issue resolved once I deleted those files permanently. Risky and not an ideal choice. I really think Photos should have a "Duplicate" function like in prior years and found in Music.
Thanks for everyones help,
J
If you deleted them while not setup for icloud sync on the macbook, the deletions won't be replicated to icloud, and hence when you do connect they will be synced back to the macbook.
If your device is set up to sync, then deletions will be replicated across all your synced devices.
Russ,
Yes to both. The iMac did finally update however.
The bigger issue now is that iCloud repopulated all of the files that I had deleted manually in my Photo library (on my MacBook where I manage my photos). This tells me that iCloud is restoring my deleted photos instead of deleting them from the cloud.
I then thought that I could delete them via the iCloud site but there is no way to see the metadata, so that option is fruitless.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
J
Hi Jason,
As Tony said, what has probably happened is that the deletions did not get sync'd when you first made them and so when you eventually reconnected iCloud Photos thought that the photos were missing and so re-downloaded them.
Now that everything is sync'd and working, are deletions now being replicated across all devices? There is no need to use the iCloud site, you should be able to do everything via your phone or Mac.
iCloud is sync’d to the MacBook.
Photo library sync
