After turning on iCloud photo sync, Photos wants to import thousands of "old" photos from my iPhone

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After turning on iCloud photo sync, Photos wants to import thousands of "old" photos from my iPhone

After having some negative experiences with Photos and iCloud, I shut it off years ago and just imported photos manually when syncing my phone each day. No problems, but also no access to my photo library via iCloud on my phone. Now, I have the 2TB iCloud plan and after turning on iCloud photo sync, Photos now wants to import thousands of "old" photos from my iPhone - some are 10 years old or older. I don't keep old photos on my phone and am fastidious about importing new photos to Photos on a daily basis (I'm a professional photographer) and then deleting them off my phone. I also delete pics out of Photos that I don't want and then delete the "recently deleted" album contents; but it seems many of the photos that popped up in the monster import list are photos I have already deleted - some years and years ago. How did that happen?

My 5K iMac and iPhone 13 Pro are all synced to Photos (and the sync is current and up to date) and it appears that it's working properly in all other ways, but what's the deal with suddenly having 2,200 old photos appear out of the ether? FWIW I have about 80,000 pix in Photos (about 1.1TB), so why would it need to import anything at all besides the new photos I take? I don't want to import these old pix and then have to deal with duplicates and weeding them back out again - only to maybe have them return again? I can't be the only person experiencing this issue.

Posted on Jun 22, 2022 8:00 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

hc1111

Community Specialist

Jun 23, 2022 10:57 AM in response to RobersonPhoto

Hey there RobersonPhoto,

When enabling iCloud Photos on your Mac, it is intended to automatically upload all your photos and videos from your Mac to iCloud. This would be considered expected behavior.

We recommend looking over the information under "Turn on iCloud Photos" for more information:

When you first turn on iCloud Photos, it can take a while to upload your photos to iCloud. You can continue to use Photos while your photos are being uploaded.

Tip: To temporarily pause uploading or downloading of photos and videos with iCloud Photos, click Library in the sidebar, click Days in the toolbar, then click the Pause button at the bottom of the Days view. Photos pauses uploading and downloading for 24 hours and then resumes automatically.

You can have multiple photo libraries, but iCloud Photos keeps only the photos and videos in the System Photo Library up to date. See System Photo Library overview and Designate a library as the System Photo Library.

You can always choose to stop using iCloud Photos on your Mac if you do not want these photos uploading.

Use iCloud Photos to store photos in iCloud - Apple Support

Take care!

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Answer 2

Jun 23, 2022 11:06 AM in response to hc1111

I did note all those options as the primary upload was taking place. My goal was/is to have all my photos uploaded (and the upload completed in due time) and the system does seem to be working as designed, save for the sudden influx of old photos in the import panel when connecting my phone to my iMac. I'll check that link on library designation, that may be the issue. Thanks for the tips. Phone and Mac are up to date on current iOS and MacOS versions.

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After turning on iCloud photo sync, Photos wants to import thousands of "old" photos from my iPhone

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