iPad 3rd gen photos won't sync

Now I know it's nothing I am doing wrong with my new iPad. I am having exactly the same problem transferring photos. If I select my entire Pictures folder, only 2 of about 15 folders are transferred. I tried selecting sets of folders and only the last two folders in a series are tranferred.

I went and had Genius consult at an Apple store and they had not seen the problem and could not help. They suggested creating a single folder with all pictures or that I reset my iPad to factory settings. I am not willing to do this.

Apple needs to come up with a solution to this problem.

HAVE YOU TRIED DELETING THE IPOD PHOTO CACHE FROM YOUR "MY PICTURES" FOLDER...?

Do you work for apple as that is one of their responses to the problem to make us think it is something we are doing wrong. I think by now we have established that it is their problem as if you read through the discussion you will see some of the rediclous things they have asked people to do and the amount of time wasted doing it.

Just get it fixed APPLE

After speinding countless hours trying to resolve the problem with various solutions that have been suggested here, it is clear there is no solution available for Windows 7 users. Photos sync great on all my other apple devices and tablets - just not iPad3. I am a software developer and am used to troubleshooting new apps and problems but this one looks like a losing cause. I can't imagine what the normal consumer must feel. And it is ridiculous to suggest resizing photos to make them smaller (even if that worked) so we can see them on this great new retina display! The photo display is the biggest selling point of the iPad3.

This has been been a known problem for 3 weeks, and Apple has yet to acknowledge it, so I am going to return my iPad3 tomorrow. There is no point in waiting while my "return window" ticks away completely. I'm very, very, very sad - I had been waiting a long time for the iPad 3 to come out and was so excited to purchase it.

Apple seems to be going downhill rapidly. They would never have put out a product with this kind of problem before. Or at least they would have tried to fix the problem quickly and acknowledged it. Since they can't even acknowledge it, there is no point in getting an iPad3 unless you are a Mac user. Maybe the time has finally come for us loyal Apple customers to begin to look elsewhere. I would certainly never rush out and buy the latest Apple toy again like I used to do.

Agree completely but in reading other threads on other forums about this mac users are experiencing the same problems as you say the should acknowledge it and sort it.

I think it is normal Apple policy to say that this is the first time they have heard of an issue. They seem to say it every time there is an issue of any kind. They even keep saying it after they have heard about the issue. You can speak to the same person several times and get the same response.

I keep meaning to record them saying it over and over again. It could make a good music track.

In terms of fixing it, I guess they won't consider it urgent unless it hits sales or becomes newsworthy.

They probably are fixing it, but the process will be something like

2 weeks waiting to see if it is an issue

2 weeks managing it and discussing it. (OK it is a big company so 5 weeks management time)

3 weeks fixing it (big company again - some developer probably only gets 1 week to fix it)

3 or 4 weeks testing the fix

then they will release it when they next have a scheduled release.

If it is newsworthy then this process speeds up.

Remember, they have a lot of money and want more. It is cheaper to ignore you and shut you up than to fix anything quickly.

Here is my latest correspondence from Apple. I have to say my service rep has been very nice and responsive, although I am very unhappy with the explanation itself (but that isn't his fault). They are now saying the issue is with Windows 7 and how it handles the cache. While I have a very good working knowledge of computers I have no clue if that is the truth or a convenient excuse and pushing the blame to Microsoft.

J,

I thought I sent you an email last week with the reply. They continue to say the iPad supports photos of 3000 pixels in height or width. Anything in access of this will not be noticeably clearer unless you were to zoom in on it exceeding 30%. Therefore the current answer to the problem is to reduce the highest pixel diminution to not exceed 3000 pixels. Sync all of the photos and there should be no issue. the ones that you sync in excess of this will have to be synced in smaller quantities.

I know this is not the answer you wanted, but it is a workaround until they can resolve the issue permanently with Windows 7 and iTunes. They assure that it is not the device. All device will react the same per it is not a problem with the device, its the computer vs iTunes processing the large amounts of the data. So if you compress it first to 3000 pixels it should work without any issue.

That's the only response I have received from the engineers regarding this issue. I have had one call after yours and this was the information I had to provide. He also had Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with iTunes 10.6.

The reason it works on your phone and iPad 2 is because the photos in cache are automatically reduced in size to correspond with the device. The iPad is capable of handling the large photos but it seems at this time Windows 7 64 bit with itunes 10.6 can't handle the large amy of data sharing with the Cache.

If any further info on this comes my way I will follow up with you. Thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue.

Apple

Interesting response from Apple. If it is the large cache why won't even one folder with 7 pictures of normal size sync correctly? I believe that the problem is iTunes and not the iPad3 since it works fine on Mac (most of the time, I did hear of some issues). But if you use Windows 7 you can't use the iPad3 with Windows if you want your photos on there.

I even tried restoring iPad3 to factory defaults, deleting all caches and temporary folders on my computer, rebooting computer, reinstalling iTunes, changing my Apple ID, and moving 1 or 2 folders at a time (with a very small number of photos) from a completely new and different folder in my computer,. Most of the photos transferred but not all, and the ones that did were intermixed across the other albums. One of the albums had absolutely NO pictures from that album in it, but consisted entirely of photos from the other albums. So it is an iTunes bug but the size issue is not an array or data problem. My theory is that there is a bug in their process when they don't optimize. There used to be this "optimizing photos" step that took place first, and it no longer does with iPad3. I think there is a bug in the code so that it doesn't work without that step. That is why it works on other devices.

BTW my largest photo size is 2816 x 2112, taken with Canon point and shoot. This is a standard hi-res size, and below the 3000 mentioned above in Apple's reply to "J". I always use this standard "large" resolution - then you can make high-quality larger format prints to frame.

So Apple is suggesting that "J" and others go in and resize thousands of photos? To a smaller resolution so they can see them on their new high resolution device? And then they would need to save them separately in another area on their computer so they don't "lose" their original formats. Wow. Am stunned.

What is interesting is that the very first time I tried to sync, I did it to a higher level folder that my subfolder albums are in (like I do in iPad 1 and 2) and I checked "sync to all folders" and it moved them all with no problem but didn't create separate albums. They were all in one huge batch (5000 photos) under Photos, with no albums. For some reason, there were some dups - about 100 dups. When I started over from scratch and tried to sync to each folder individually or a few at a time, it couldn't do it. Either it only did a small number or put them in the wrong albums. So it doesn't seem like a size issue. It seems like maybe it is a coding bug with the temporary arrays it creates during processing that doesn't happen on devices that need optimization because the optimization step creates the structure and arrays first. Although that doesn't explain why someone above couldn't even sync one folder with just a few photos. Seems like a developer at Apple could figure this all out pretty quickly with access to the code. There is plenty of troubleshooting information in this forum thread alone. I wish Apple could just rewrite iTunes - it has always been a memory hogging, buggy, slow app.

I put a few on a buddy's iPad3 (using his mac) and they look fantastic. There is a noticeable difference from the iPad2 holding the same picture side by side. And you can pinch and zoom in on detail and not lose any clarity. But I can't see buying a Mac just to fix the problem and from a post above it looks like some Mac users are reporting problems as well.

I got tired of trying over and over again, and even tried reducing the resolution of all the photos I intended to put on my Ipad 3 that I had easily on my Ipad 2. I made a photoshp action to reduce all of the photos to the max Ipad 3 screen, and it STILL did not work, deltting the cache, reseting, rebooting, changing the folder location etc.

I am for now simply adding them manually in full resolution to my "Secure My Privacy" photo app, just not password protecting the regular photos. This works well and simple, but you cannot use the new Iphoto app I paid for... The Secure My Privacy app is from Linkus and it works well.

Hopefully they fix this eventually....

Apart from the appaling spelling and grammar in the reply from Apple, it's also a lie to suggest the problem lies with Windows.

It's a lie because we were all able to sync our photos from our Windows machine onto our previous versioned iPads.

That reply has made up my mind. My iPad 3 is being returned. This type of corporate bullshite is happening far too often these days, and will continue to unless we the sheeple stop sitting around waiting for something to happen.

Highly recommend returning. Returned mine today and Best Buy was great about it. Feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Great time for a competitor to come in with a better tablet and take all the disgruntled Apple customers away. Even better customer service would be a compelling reason to jump ship.

I got the same problem with my new iPad 3 when i try to sync photos from Photoshop Elements 10. It works fine with my iPad2 and my iPhone4s. I do not want to resize my 44.000 photos,

all i want as a CLIENT and SHAREHOLDER of Apple that Apple fixes THIS massive problem asap!

I had the same problems but I think to found the solution for that.

1. turn off WiFi on iPad

2. turn off photo sync in iTunes to delete all photos on iPad

3. turn on photo sync again

So I could synced all my photos 12.000 to my iPad 3 4G 32GB

Try it. I hope that is the workaround!

Wow - what a pain! I just spent several hours reviewing all the threads relating to this issue. For my part, I have (2) iPhone 4S - sync all photos fine. I have iPad2 - syncs all photos fine. I have (2) iPad3 (new) - ONE syncs fine (wife's) and one does NOT (mine).

The iPad3 that syncs fine is a 16GB WiFi-only unit - connected to Win7 64-bit Pro, latest iTunes. Hers sync'd all 1500 photos in about 12 albums - slower than ****, but finished and all seem to view fine. Her iPad3 is connecting to her PC, which is similar config to mine but is different physical PC. All photos are same physical files on NAS at home.

My iPad3, which did NOT sync fine - 64GB Verizon 4GB LTE - connected to Win7 64-bit, latest iTunes. I tried many of the 'snake-oil' remedies described on these pages, but the only thing that worked for me was to resize the larger photos.

Once I resized the photos to a maximum dimension of 3072 (done en mass using Windows Live Photo Gallery) and eliminated the larger originals (I was careful to make a new folder with copies of my originals), I was able to sync fast and furious to MY iPad3 64GB 4G LTE Verizon unit.

Why, why, why??? ;(

I'm happy to have a work-around, but as many have said, this is clearly an Apple bug of some kind - hopefully Apple will get this fixed ASAP!