I finally went on chat & worked my way up to third level support from Apple. That tech finally knew what she was doing. Had me do a variety of settings such as not sync photos at all, (which didn't erase the photos as expected), this gave her a clue that there was something wrong, not user error. She had me do a variety of clicking & unclicking & syncing with a variety of these settings and finally it all began to sync properly. It took a long time, hours in fact, while we waited through all the varieties of syncing. I don't know exactly which one worked, I think it was just a combination that worked around whatever bug was preventing the sync. Apple has the best customer support system. Even when I got disconnected between transfer from level one chat, to level two phone support, when I called back in, they picked up the case # & continued rather than having to start from scratch. All is well now & I'm syncing just the way I needed in the beginning but wasn't able to.