Photo sync issues after 10.8.2, iOS 6, iPhoto 9.4 upgrades

@ubic:

are you kinding us?

One post would be enough! Everybody who posted here, gets an email when a new post is written: now everyone just got about 10 mails with our "comment". I hope this is no bug on your Mac 😉

I'm so happy, that's why!!!!

...Just a "&"! Unbelievable!

Agree. Don´t feel like downgrading....

-- Bumped because ubic's excitement and multi-posting...burried my post :-)

** I post this once above but it got swarmed with the larger xml related issue that prevented syncing at all. Not complaining, just wanted to revisit this other issue now that folks are mostly able to get their syncing started. I'm pretty sure this, too, is an xml related issue. To that end, can anyone point to where iTunes is getting it's list of iPhoto Events and Albums? **

I believe we are all experiencing variants of the same issue.

Here is mine and I'd ask if others are seeing this specific issue as well.

With an iOS device attached, and looking at the photos tab, I see a number of Events with questionable names that seem to be old data from somewhere. They look like the name of test events I may have made and delted over the years. Regardless...they are are empty.

I then checked the Advanced tab within iTunes and used the share photos option I use to stream photos to my TV and the same empty Events are there too.

These first two are annoying...and now comes the really troubling part.

For the Events that are not blank and look like the ones in my iPhoto library, many of these events are not reporting the same number of photos as does iPhoto. For example, an event named "Beach" in iphoto consists of 100 photos, but that same event when selected within iTunes only has 85 photos in it. When iTunes sync'ed the first time it reported XXX items could not be sync'ed check iTunes. That error message has not yet reoccurred but I can confirm that only the 85 photos sync'ed not the 100 that are present on my iPhoto 9.4 library.

If I drag the entire contents of that same 100 photo event to the desktop and then drag it back into iPhoto, iTunes will then recognize it as containing the full 100 photos. But...of course you lose all tags, face data, etc.

I'm not yet prepared to do this major surgery, but does anyone have other ideas?

One additional thing I noted...remember that there were always more pictures in the iPhoto Event than in the iTunes list for that Event. Well, I noted that all the images that were missing from iTunes and thus my iOS device, pretty much sucked. Why is that important? It seems like they might have been pictures I previously deleted but that iPhoto still has in the Event even though iTunes doesn't "see" them.

Conversely, it seems like iTunes is seeing old Events that I had long since deleted from previous incarnations of iPhoto.

Anyway...if you have a moment check out your iTunes list of Events and Albums to see if 1) there are extraneous Events listed there and 2) if the number of pictures in those events matches the same number reported by iPhoto.

thanks!!

rwross - you have a completely different problem. In general it's a better idea to start a new topic if your problem is different, even if does sound related. As you saw, it can get lost in the deluge if you don't do that.

It sounds like your iPhoto Library is slightly corrupted.

You may be able to if fix it (you'll probably want to wait until iPhoto 9.4.1 comes out) by quiting iPhoto, then starting it up again while holding down the command and option keys. You'll see a series of options to repair your library, one of which is specifically to locate missing pictures.

Sure...I'll give the new thread a try and see if it takes.

That said, I don't think it's a corrupted library in the normal sense of the word unless it gets corrupted the same way each time 9.4.0 "updates" the library.

I've already restored from backup on two different Macs and had the exact same issue arise.

To be clear, iPhoto isn't missing any pictures...iTunes is the one missing them. iTunes is also displaying a number of "rogue" Photo events that shouldn't be there and are not present in iPhoto...

Feel free tor reply here or on the thread I start up...

@rwross - On the other hand - this may be a different symptom of the same problem, especially if some of the music you used in a slideshow has a "<" or ">" or a quotation mark in the song, album or artist name. That could potentially cause iTunes to skip reading part of the XML file and pick up again in the wrong place. The result might theoretically look like seemingly scrambled, phantom albums.

wow...I didn't consider that at all.

I'm a few steps back on that entire line of thinking.

I don't recall every having used music in a particular slide show. How would I go about checking and resolving that?

Thanks Joseph! Mucc appreciated!

Thanks Andrew

Here's a good description of how to locate the offending ampersands (or similar characters) in your iPhoto. You use iPhoto Library Manager and TextWrangler:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4320139

It solved the problem for me!!

Mr. Delaney,

Thanks. I did exactly as you described and I even went a bit further and set the song on the custom playlist to be default. It took a minute or so for iTunes to notice. I think I had to close and reopen iPhoto a few times after making the playlist change removing the song with the & followed by a space. I used TextWrangler id404010395 from the Mac App store to find the offending ampersand and the related Photo Album.

Thanks again for your help.

Turns out you were right...but I don't know how to fix it.

I found references to the old defunct Events in the albumdata.xml file I also found picture counts that did not match those within iPhoto itself.

I'm thinking this must simply be a bug in 9.4.0 and there's little I can do to fix it because iPhoto rebuilds the XML file everytime in launches or closes.

I even tried deleting the albumdata.xml file completely in hopes that iPhoto would build it anew without the erroneous data...no joy. iPhoto did rebuild the xml file, but it had the same legacy and incorrect entries.

Any thoughts?

Hello!

RE: IT ACTUALLY WORKED!! YES!! 🙂

Same issues here with the "Unknown Error 1140" when trying to Sync my iPHONE 4S.

I tried what I thought was everything, but to no avail. After reading the iTUNE "&" symbol issue with photos that had music saved with them, I went back to my iPHOTO library and deleted the only slide show that had a few songs (I took the fast easy way out...no looking for "&" signs...I just hit delete). Honestly, the fix sounded bogus, but the slide show was small and could be replaced easily so I had nothing to loose and what the heck, after 4 hours of failure I thought I would give it a try...

As soon as the photos that had music embedded were gone from iPHOTO I went back to iTUNES to try and sync my iPHONE 4S and everything worked 100%! YES!!!

THANK YOU Joseph, I have no idea how you figured that out but it worked!!!!!

Sincerely,

Oldscool2