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iPhone not uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library. Why?

I have 2 iPhones 6Plus's both fully updated. I have enabled them both to use iCloud Photo Library. One has synced up nicely, the other has not pulled any photos down from the cloud and says that it has 2,373 items to upload. Any ideas what could be preventing it? I have tried toggling iCloud Photo Library off and on with no success. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 8.3, iCloud Photo Library

Posted on Apr 12, 2015 8:34 AM

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18 replies

May 14, 2017 5:59 PM in response to ogr1868

I have now figured out a fix that has worked for me, I had 72 photos waiting to be uploaded to iCloud (which weren't real photos as I deleted them off my phone already) which took up 10gb of storage on my 32gb iPhone 7. I researched for about an hour and then thought to sign out of iCloud (on my phone) and signing back in which fixed the glitch and now I have 10gb of storage back.


Hope this works for you, as it did for me.

Sep 4, 2017 3:18 PM in response to Christian_Andrade

I'm happy that worked for you. However, I don't see how one can "sign out" of iCloud without triggering the message that photos and videos not downloaded will be removed from the phone. I tried to sign out of iCloud on my Mac and received the same message that all documents stored in iCloud will be removed from the computer. Do they reappear once you sign back in?

Apr 18, 2015 8:06 PM in response to mattsm1th

I've been experiencing this issue as well. My only work around is to make sure my 6 plus is plugged in and on my WiFi. I then open up the iOS photo app on both my phone and iPad. This seems to jump start the process and all photos on the phone sync up nicely. This is definitely a glitch because when I scroll all the way to the bottom of my image collection in photo app on the phone it always has to re-upload several thousand images before getting my most recent pics. up to iCloud. However, this is not as bad as it sounds and typically takes about 5-10mins for complete. Hope this helps.

May 6, 2015 8:07 AM in response to ogr1868

You may not like this solution, but it's the last thing that the apple care support could offer.

Let's say you have a bunch of photos stuck on syncing...


  • Connect iPhone to a computer via the cable, set iPhone to Airplane mode
  • Use Photos.app and select your iPhone in the sidebar (enable the sidebar first)
  • Select the photos you want to import
  • Select "Import"
  • Now all your photos are downloaded from the iPhone and then uploaded to iCloud Photo library.
  • Delete the Photos on your iPhone manually, also from the "trash"
  • Disable airplane mode on the iPhone
  • Disable iCloud photo library in the settings of iCloud.
  • Log out of your iCloud account on the iPhone
  • Wait till all the photos on the iPhone are deleted as well... delete them manually, also from trash (make sure you have them all in the Photos app on your mac!)
  • Restart your Phone
  • Log into your iCloud again and enable iCloud photo library.
  • All the photos should sync.


I hope this helps, it helped me at least!

May 6, 2015 8:11 AM in response to ogr1868

Same thing here.

iPhone 6 with iOS 8.3, new photos not uploading or downloading. I have tried to turn off iCloud photo library all together, erased all pictures and then turned it on again.

It worked for a while, but when I took new pictures with iPhone it got stuck again: it just keeps saying pictures uploading/downloading.

I also have an iPad mini connected to the same Wifi network working properly, also tried reseting network settings to no avail.


Truly frustrating, not an apple experience at all.....

May 6, 2015 8:28 AM in response to bamaro

The service is still in beta and seems to have a lot of 'small' issues.


There have been reported issues of seemingly stalled uploads, but those uploads actually just duplicated a single file 1000's of times on the Apple server. This breaks your sync and as far as I know this issue hasn't been fully resolved yet.


I would expect issues like this to be a beta bug, but as there is no way to troubleshoot the matter, we will probably never know until it fixes itself magically.

May 6, 2015 11:31 AM in response to bamaro

Ah yes, you're right. They've removed all the beta signage. Still, this problem clearly has been carried over as it was already present in the beta phase.


In general this service is quite poor: there is no way to configure the service so you can optimize space on your iOS devices. Instead it just throws all your video/photos on all devices, even if the device will run out of space.


This clearly needs a lot more work.

May 15, 2015 3:39 PM in response to ARB-82

Glad it's not just me and my iPhone with this problem.


I've spent hours resetting network settings, switching on and off the Photo Library, signing in and out of iCloud, deleting photos ..... Nothing seems to work. It's so frustrating. I guess I'll just have to manually download photos from my iPhone to my Mac. Not the advertised Apple experience.

iPhone not uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library. Why?

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