icloud photo sync

It's 2023. How many more decades before Photos (iOS) / Photos (iCloud) / Photos (Mac) actually functions as intended?

I've been with Apple's online services since the iTools days. My email is @mac.com I'm the guy everybody goes to when they need a Mac solution.

But this, photo synching, is beyond me. For years I've tried to make this work, across multiple iPhones, multiple Macs, multiple versions of iOS and macOS. I've scoured the forums, gone through the knowledgebase, tried **** near everything short of the mystic arts.

And yet... hours (on a good day); days; even weeks can go by before Photos on my Mac (running Ventura) will synch with Photos in the Cloud. The photos and videos are there. They just refuse to come down from the heavens.

Today I used my iPhone 11 running iOS 16.3.1 to shoot photos and videos for a news item I'm filing. That was from 1:00pm-2:30pm. It's now 7:46pm. The photos made it from the phone to the cloud, but that's where they sit.

Photos on my Mac (macOS 13.3.1) hasn't updated since early this morning. And this is the thing that bugs me - there's no way to force it to update. No button that says "synch now". Activity viewer shows no activity.

Restarting the devices won't force it to synch — nor should we need to do that even if it was a solution.

Remember when Apple's sell-line was "it just works?". Yeah, not so much anymore.

iCloud Photos:

Mac Photos: