iCloud is not importing all photos from my iPhone, and importing albums without the photos.

Question

iCloud is not importing all photos from my iPhone, and importing albums without the photos.

iCloud is not importing my iPhone photo library correctly. It skips some of my albums altogether. It also imports other albums without the corresponding photos, so that approximately 50 of my folders that should contain photos are empty folders in the cloud. It also skips entire months of photos that are stored on my iPhone. I have signed in and out of iCloud. Turned iCloud photos off and back on again. Turned off shared folders. Turned My Photo Stream off and back on again. Rebooted my phone. Etc. etc. etc. and ad nauseum, but nothing I've tried solves the problem. I've spent an entire week working on this already. My iCloud storage has 1.5 TB available so it's not a space issue. How do I fix this?

iPhone X, iOS 14

Posted on Mar 26, 2021 2:18 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

LACAllen

Level 8

43,416 points

Mar 27, 2021 3:33 PM in response to Pretty_Amused

Is that somehow normal for it to skip entire months' worth of data in the process? Or should I be concerned?

No way to know what normal is.

63,000 photos is a very large library. And agin, you're not simply uploading files. You are syncing a photo database between 2 devices. Our version of "logical" is linear.

Not a great answer, but it will finish when it finishes. You have likely extended the time by all the toggling off and on.

You sent multiple and conflicting commands to the process.

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Answer 2

LACAllen

Level 8

43,416 points

Mar 26, 2021 6:20 PM in response to Pretty_Amused

Pretty_Amused wrote:

iCloud is not importing my iPhone photo library correctly. It skips some of my albums altogether. It also imports other albums without the corresponding photos, so that approximately 50 of my folders that should contain photos are empty folders in the cloud. It also skips entire months of photos that are stored on my iPhone. I have signed in and out of iCloud. Turned iCloud photos off and back on again. Turned off shared folders. Turned My Photo Stream off and back on again. Rebooted my phone. Etc. etc. etc. and ad nauseum, but nothing I've tried solves the problem. I've spent an entire week working on this already. My iCloud storage has 1.5 TB available so it's not a space issue. How do I fix this?

How many photos and how long have you waited?

All that toggling is likely making it worse.

It is not an FTP upload. You are syncing a complex photo database.

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Answer 3

Mar 27, 2021 3:24 PM in response to LACAllen

Thank you for your reply. I think you're right that maybe I haven't waited long enough. It has been 7 days, but the Photo app on my phone shows it is still uploading 46,960 of 63,400 items. My Photo Library is set to store originals on disk. The library is currently 855 GB and increasing at a rate of several GB/hour. The Photo app on my iMac went through many days showing the library progress, but eventually appeared to have finished with the words "Updated Just Now." That's when I got very concerned about the empty folders and months' worth of missing photos. However, it now shows that it is updating items again, and I am beginning to see empty thumbnails appear inside a couple of the empty albums. Do the empty thumbnails sound normal? There is also no indication that iCloud knows that photos even exist for September and October 2020, even though it does contain my photos for August and November 2020. Is that somehow normal for it to skip entire months' worth of data in the process? Or should I be concerned?

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iCloud is not importing all photos from my iPhone, and importing albums without the photos.

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