Photos sync'd to iPhone from iTunes all messed up in iOS 8.1

I share your frustration. Really, how helpful is it to search for the solution to an issue and all we get is a chance to read every single message from others in exactly the same situation? Description of the problem but no solution.

In conversations with friends, family, colleagues and especially students I used to jump into my IOS Photos, select a folder and quickly find an image I put there just for this moment. That is now completely impossible. I've given up. It's like the my iPhone used to be an amazing pocket photo library, now all it's good for are photos I've taken in the past couple of weeks--nothing else is in the right folder, everything nearly impossible to find. I've had to explain to my girlfriend why my ex-wife's photo shows up on a folder, but I can't find the portrait of us that we made last year.

I'm hoping to find a way to turn off whatever sinister auto-sort feature has done caused this mess.

Update to the situation.

After reading various responses on different forums I have successfully narrowed down the problem and have a fully reproducible and correctable scenario.

I have reproduced the same problem on my iPad Air 2 and my iPhone 6, my wife's iPad mini 4 and her iPhone 5s.

We have 2,000 photos organised into about 50 albums on our Macs, and synced the folders from the Macs to the iPads and iPhones using iTunes. This I did immediately after update 10.1.1. Since then, up to today they all remained perfectly organised as we expected on the 4 devices.

Seeing that update 10.2 is available, I checked all 4 this morning and the photos were still all perfectly OK, all 2000 in the 50 separate albums.

I then in turn updated all 4 devices. Immediately the update completed the photo libraries on all 4 devices were scrambled, with the same 2000 photos in the samev 50 Albums, but also randomly duplicated in about another 100 albums with the same names as the originals.

On two of the devices I have managed to restore order by simply forcing a sync in iTunes, which did not copy any photos from the Macs to the devices, but deleted the spurious albums. On the other two I have had to delete all the photos by unchecking Sync Photos in iTunes and then syncing and then selecting Sync Photos and recopying all 2000 again.

Please see my post on Page 2 for details. I have given up on this and now expect all iOS upgrades to scramble my photo albums. It does not happen with every single upgrade but most of them do cause the issue. Sometimes it happens with my iPhone (my old 5 and now my new 7), sometimes with my iPad, and sometimes with both.

To "correct" it I delete the iPod Photo Cache Folder (I use Windows for syncing but the same happens with my MBP) and then do a new sync with the proper folders/albums selected in iTunes. This deletes the junk/duplicated albums and restores the proper ones. This is a pain as it adds extra time to an upgrade. My repeated contacts with AppleCare for over a year did not result in a solution. They escalated it to Engineering on several occasions and Engineering kept suggesting the same things that had been tried repeatedly before. Also FWIW, I have a contact on the ASC who is a Level 10. He has the same problem and also gave up, does what I do above.

I have this same problem and I suspect it stems from Apple's fancy "I will organize your photos into collections for you" process that occurs when your phone is plugged in at night and idle. My first suggestion: never fully charge your phone. If that's not practical, my second suggestion: strip all Exif data from your photos and change their creation and modification dates to be identical in every folder.

My problem only occurs when I do an iOS upgrade. I have stripped all metadata from my photos using a 3rd party program. It did not help. The creation date is automatically recreated when a photo is copied.

Just tested last few days and it's worked. I'm also facing this mess up problem for years and until last few days I tried this method. Inside iTunes sync photo sections, do not put in any others folders beside the folders that u wish to synced. Meaning to say this stupid iTunes will also sync unticked folders besides ticked folders. So just make sure there is no more others folders than the one u wanna sync. Good luck.

UPDATE: I have 3000+ photos in twelve different folders, named by year, I had all photos stripped of EXIF data and forced every one of them to have the same file timestamp. It was working fine ... until I updated to iOS 10.3. Now that the phone's been plugged in overnight, I have a scrambled mess with 86 (I counted) albums in "My Albums". Luckily, it looks like the first versions of the albums are correct, containing all their photos and nothing else. When I scroll down, there are multiple duplicates of these albums with the wrong photos in them, but if I stay up at the top, it's good enough.

Here is my own update on this issue. No end in sight, sorry to say. 😟

My iPhone 7 and my iPad Air were both upgraded to iOS 10.3 and unfortunately the Photos Apps on both were corrupted again as in the past. The iPad had 2 Albums that had been synced through iTunes. After upgrading 7 additional junk albums were created by the upgrade process. The iPhone had 3 Albums originally and 6 additional junkers were created during the upgrade process.

In order to "fix" the Photos App I had do a new sync with no photos selected; this deletes the originals and the junkers, then delete the iPod Photo Cache, then do a new sync with the proper albums, and repeat the process with the other device. This takes an extra 10 minutes or so per device and access to the syncing computer.

This issue started in late 2014 with an iOS 8.x upgrade in an iPhone 5 and an iPad Air and continues with a new phone and a new iPad (exchanged by Apple Care). I have had an open case with AppleCare Level 2 since early 2015 which has gone to Engineering on several occasions but the Engineering feedback has not been helpful; restore as new, delete the iPod Photo Cache, try different photos, etc. Duh, if they were to read the AppleCare notes they would see that all that had been done several times to no avail. Since this occurs to various others, including a Level 10 ASC contributor, the problem is not caused by my own pictures. They were stripped of all metadata anyway so it is not the metadata.

It is looking like this issue will never be fixed. It has been 2+ years, a series of iOS upgrades, and new hardware, all to no avail.

Hi, I think I may have some of the solution to the problem of the original post.

Basically along the lines of "My photos are all messed up, I have them in folders but they don't stay in their folders when i sync them through iTunes"

So... like I said I think I have a solution, or at least a partial solution, because I don't know if this will work across multiple devices.

A bit of background so you can see if this suits your situation:

I have just had my laptop stolen, went out bought a new one and was dealing with how do I sync everything again. I went through the "OMG iTunes only sync's one way PC to iPhone and this means I'll loose all my photos and music" One step at time I managed to recover the photos with a program called AnyTrans. It's meant to get the music as well but... that hasn't so far gone to plan. Apparently the good people at AnyTrans have my case and are working on a solution for my "rare" case.

Anyway... Having leant from this I now have my photos on the OneDrive cloud. So... not an Apple product, and neither is my Laptop by the way... that's a Lenovo, but... I do have an iPhone 6.

Okay so that you have where it's at:

1 x Lenovo Laptop

1 x OneDrive Cloud storage - now

1 x Apple iPhone 6

The original problem of the laptop doing a runner, not having my music or my photos (I am still dealing with the music) now I have my photos I put all 9099 photos in their respective folders and pressed "sync" allowing photos to sync.

This is when it hit the fan. 9099 photos are back in the phone... great... only they are scattered everywhere throughout a heap of folders. but the first two folders were perfect they had the right photos. This got me thinking maybe the program that sorts the photos that Apple has has a limit, or does't like big photos dumps.

So back into the original photo folder on OneDrive and I see a new folder has been added called iPod photo cache.

I did what a heap of people here did and deleted the folder, with one extra exception, when I went back to iTunes I went to "select folders" in the "Sync Folder" section and... over about 15 minutes I selected a new folder and pressed "apply." (Not "done") selecting one folder at a time.

1) Got to sync folders

2) Take off "all photos" and go to "selected photos"

3) Click a folder from the list of folders containing your photos that appears

4) Click "apply"

5) Continue until finished on each folder

You can check your phone as this is happening. It works. Yeah it takes 15 minutes, but this is a **** of a lot better than sorting 9099 photos on your phone without a guarantee it will work later.

Mani, I have also encountered issues with my Photos albums after upgrading to IOS 8.1. I had originally uploaded my photographs into iTunes using IOS 7.0 and everything was fine. After adding some more photos using version 8.0, I noticed a number of sequence sort errors. Now with the latest relates of IOS 8.1, I'm seeing one album split up into 14 albums all with the same name. Another single album is now split up into 13 albums with the same name. There is also one more album (split up into 3) that contains photographs that were never loaded into the original.

I'm going to resync my photographs once again and hope for the best. I hope Apple recognizes these issues and takes steps to correct the sort sequence issue along with the unwanted creation of multiple same-named albums containing random photgraphs.

Hi.

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, and all my photos are randomly messed up. I´ve tried to reinstall a complete backup - with no luck. I´ve even delete all my photos (31.000) and imported them once more - without luck. The photos in iPhoto on my mac is correct.

By coincidence I teste a foto app called Exif Wizard, and in that app every photo is alphabeticly in order :-)

Then I guess it has to be something with the Photos app on the iPhone.

This is my first post to the community. I have the same problem. I have 8.1.1 on iPhone5 64gb. All was good until last two minor updates. My phone pictures show multiple folder names in random order. I have 9000 photos. I have deleted, reset, removed ipodphotocache, and synced with itunes, and repeated this process several times. Same results. Must be a size limit in terms of transfer size or number of files giving the iphone a problem.

I`m also having this issue.

I have a iphone 6 on 8.1.1... I sync more than 14000 photos on several folders and its all mixed up.

I tried to delete all ipod cache folder and re-sync again... but the issue remains.

on iphone 5 and ios7 all was fine...

any thoughts?

Cheers

Felipe

Same problem here on 8.1.3. All of my photo folders on my phone were duplicated. i have to delete them all and resync. This happens all the time now.

Ditto for me as well. My photos in iPhoto on my Mac are arranged by date, but syncing to the iPhone 6 leaves the photos all messed up with really no real method as to how they were organized. This makes finding photos hard because they are not really in any order at all. Didn't have the problem with earlier versions of the OS or my iPhone 5.