You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

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:


iMac 27″ 5K

Posted on Apr 27, 2023 3:49 PM

Reply

Similar questions

3 replies

Apr 27, 2023 7:11 PM in response to Mark Rushton

11:08pm, they finally synched.


FYI, this batch included 18 photos and three videos (under 3 minutes each).


Is it unreasonable to expect these to synch in something under nine hours? Let's call it eight hours, since that's the amount of time my iPhone was back home, on WiFi, and in its charging stand. Nothing that should have impeded the synch (and as I noted, the material was up in the cloud hours ago).

Aug 29, 2023 1:29 PM in response to Mark Rushton

Not sure if it's the same issue, but my wife is driving me a bit crazy because of problems iCloud sync (we think) has caused, such as duplicated photos, photos she thought she had deleted that have shown up again, and other issues across her devices. What I've found when I tested on my devices is the sync works very quickly (within a few seconds) across IOS devices, but not to an OS X device. I didn't monitor enough to determine if it EVER synced to the OS X device, but it definitely didn't do it within 5 to 10 minutes. I'm running OS X Ventura 13.4.1 and IOS 16.6 on my iPhone and iPad.

icloud photo sync

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.