The iPhone “iPhone” cannot be synced. The required file cannot be found.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but this requires a lot of explanation.

There are many posts on this topic, however most are over 10 years old and don't apply anymore or if newer, don't work. Hopefully someone can lead me in the right direction to solve this issue.

Last month, I replaced my iPhone 7 with an iPhone 11 Pro and thought that I'd brought over everything when I restored the previous phone to the new one using Finder on my Mac. I don't use the Photos app much, preferring a different app for organization so never checked that. Today I went to backup and sync and without thinking updated ios from 16.1 to 16.2 before backing up. Never did that before, so of course it came back to bite me. I backup locally, not to iCloud.

After the update, I backed up and when synching my iphone 11 Pro, I get the title message above. In looking around, I noticed that Photos did not sync so there were no pictures there, other than a few. I looked at the setting & it was not set to sync. I ticked the box and got the error again. One recent poster suggested opening Image Capture on my Mac and selecting "None" for app to open on connection, however, that didn't work. Others suggested syncing without Photos checked and then doing it again with it checked. I have tried wiping my phone and restoring from a backup, reinstalling ios from Recovery Mode, all to no avail.

Note, after each step, I ejected the iPhone, rebooted it and also the iMac.

I guess, I could wipe the phone and restore an older backup from December 1, but am trying to avoid that. Any help would be much appreciated.