Cannot sync photos "iPhoto library is not yet available"

I have just spoken to an Apple senior advisor who has solved this for me.

***Please back up your iPhone and Photos computer before doing this***

Basically the Photos just needs resetting When you open Photos. hold down alt. This will then ask you to chose which library to use. Create a new one called Test or something, and put a few pictures in there.

Then select this as the System Photo library by following instructions below:

Designate a System Photo Library in Photos - Apple Support

Open iTunes and onto your iPhone, when plugged in, click on the photos tab, and select this as your Photo library.

Quit Photos and iTunes.

Open Photos again whilst holding alt. Rechoose your origional photos library, and follow instructions above to designate this as your system photo library.

Select your iPhone from within iTunes and move to photos tab. Reselect your origional photos library.

Click sync. Worked for me and got rid of that error message!

What a nightmare! What are we supposed to do- take off work to fix the mess they've created? The number one problem with the iPhone it that it has no drag and drop capabilities (it has at times, mine has none), and we cannot open docs with the apps of our choice. In short, we have no 'Finder.' The iTunes interface is equivalent to the computers you interface with at places like Sears- extremely restricted.

Second, as long as the public keeps going ape over the iPhone the company will continue doing what it's doing now: neglecting user improvements, changing the size and width of the phone, simplifying the graphics...in other words, just keep raking it in.

I have the same problem as you and you know what? I've spent enough months of my life trying to fix crap software that I paid a mint for. If it won't sync, fine, don't sync. I don't even care...I'll find another solution- because I actually do think differently...

I myself had this problem when trying to sync iPhone running on IOS v9.2.1. I quit Photos and iTunes and then tried to sync my phone again. This time it worked no problems. Then i tried to sync my iPad which had the same problem, and this also worked.🙂

This problem popped up today.

My iPad 2 is running IOS 7.1.1 and my new iMac OS 10.11.

I am very unknowledgeable about computers so I resorted to the simplest procedure first.

I simply rebooted both iPad and iMac then synced again.

No problems after that.

All photos synced up.

I had a similar problem but never got the sync to work from the beginning. But I tried this fix and now everything (iMac to iPhone, iPad) is working. The underlying problem seems to be due to a permissions error which was easy to fix.

iTunes can’t sync because Photos app is unavailable. Pain!

Navigate to the source of your Photos library. Open finder and locate it, typically within your User area under Pictures.

Right click on ‘Photos Library’ and select Get Info. At the bottom you will see a lock. Click it and enter your admin password. From the drop down lists at the bottom ensure ‘everyone’ has the option to read and write to the file.

Get Info pane for the library folder. Here we can change the permissions.

This will allow the system and other process to write to your Photos library. It seems during the sync process if iTunes needs to write to the library it can’t, thus the process fails.

Restart both Photos and iTunes and sync your iPhone/iPad again. It should now work.

I don’t know why this fails, but this fix does seem to work.

THANK YOU- finally I got my photos to sync. THANK YOU!!!!!!

This worked, but it seems I have to keep doing this, as every few times the sync fails for the same reason.

Thank you so much @ANC-CNA

Worked flawlessly!

Glad it worked!!

Worked like a charm---Thanks

Hi ANC-CNA - Thanks for your "permissions" suggestion. But I tried it and it didn't work for me. I'm wondering if you are also syncing your Photos to iCloud? That seems to be something that others have suggested. I'm trying to avoid that because my large number of photos would mean I'd have to pay for lots more space - and I'm not trusting their service yet. But I think Apple may be forcing us to do that in order for syncing to work. So are you "synced"? Thank you.

Gregg B

Syncing has been working fine since the fix. I do NOT sync to iCloud for the reasons you mentioned - not wanting to pay for extra space.

Thanks, this worked for me. I think I've done this before, but the recent OS update (which finally fixed another problem with my external HD failing to unmount - yay!) seems to have reset the permissions to a default of not allowing writing. So annoying. I'll try to remember this next time. Better than rebuilding the photo library which ties up iPhotos for weeks while it tries to re-sync everything to the cloud.

wow

thank you so much...

this actually works and it is extremely easy🙂

Changed 'everyone' to r/w, reloaded - didn't work.

There was another name there - 'Fetching...' - greyed out with a tiny '?' set to Read. So I changed that to r/w, reloaded and that worked. It still is marked as Fetching... very odd.

Thanks again for the simple fix.