new photos app (replacing iPhoto) not syncing properly

Genius - worked exactly as described, thanks!

As a follow up to my original post, I restarted my laptop or quit the Photos App then started it again and went back to trying to sync my phone with my laptop, and finally the Photo's App allowed me to select it as the source of my photos. There are obviously some bugs with the Photos App still that some have suggested is intentional by Apple to force users to buy iCloud storage and sync from there. Hopefully this cynical approach is not being used by Apple.

Good luck everyone.

I believe this is a case where the saying "don't attribute to malice what can be explained with stupidity" is relevant. I don't believe Apple introduced this bug as a way to get people to use iCloud. I do believe it's an accidentally introduced bug and they are in no rush to fix it. That often seems to be the case when a bug only affects a limited group of their user base.

One thing I mentioned to Apple every time when I call about a problem with the Photos app is how much they have handicapped me regarding my ability to find the solutions to my problems by searching the Internet. The name of the previous photo program, iPhoto is a unique name and so if you searched for the name "iPhoto" along with a description of the symptoms of your problem you can often find a solution. Now that Apple's photo app that's included with the operating system is called "Photos" it means that searching the name "Photos" with a description of your symptoms brings up all kinds of nonrelevant information. Even putting "Apple Photos" along with your search still brings up lots of garbage. I think it was really stupid for Apple to use such a generic name for the name of their photos program. They might think it sounds cool, but they've wrecked our ability to search the Internet for solutions to problems with the Photos app

I'm trying to sync through iTunes (not using iCloud for photos), and want to sync selected albums only. Tried twice but but not all photos are copied onto my iPhone.

I can't express my frustration with what Apple has done with their overall handling of photos. First getting rid of Aperture, a truly excellent program and worse yet, replacing it with Photos. Photos has mediocre editing capability at best. But, iCloud sharing, or whatever they call it is terrible. Like others have stated, syncing with the Mac is a hit or miss (mostly miss) disaster. If anyone can recommend a good alternative (other than Adobe CC), I'd sure appreciate it. Otherwise, we can only hope that IOS 9 will fix things.

Yes, go on! You're doing great! You forgot to mention that they named the app "Photos" meaning that when we try and help ourselves, searching for an answer via Google, instead of being able to use a unique name like iPhoto and see returns that apply to iPhoto, now we search "Apple Photos" which returns all kinds of garbage. And yes, the syncing stinks. I guess it's because Apple is a small company and probably doesn't have the money to really do this right... oh, wait. They do have money! So why can't they do this right? Seems like they caught what ever disease Microsoft has. All the king's horses and all the king's men can't write a decent program.

Or that they can't manage to give more than 5 gig of storages without charging, to transfer years of Aperture photos, where flicker gives a terabyte. Must be that flicker (Yahoo) is making more money (not) than Apple. Of course now you can buy 20 gigs for 99 cents a month. Do they really need $12 a year from each of us? What about compensating Aperture users for our investment in the software (both time and money) that they have now rendered useles.

For the OP and anyone else suffering from this problem, do any of you:

1.) Use a camera that imports RAWs in any variety (CR2 for Canon, numerous others by manufacturer), and/or

2.) Are you upgrading from an iPhotos/Aperture library that contained any of said file?

I found this thread because I was suffering the same problem, and then I began pattern matching. Out of a 96 image album, only 6 would sync... the 6 JPGs. Out of 1150, 980 would sync... the remainder were RAWs. And when I left Photos running and walked away, my laptop would sound like it was auditioning for the role of a Harrier jump jet. After letting it do that for a few hours, I closed Photos, opened iTunes, and resynced. More photos are now visible. So I think that whatever engine it's using to create JPG previews for iLife usage is less efficient than Aperture's, and it won't accept the versions made by previous programs. So I now have 8700 RAW files that my computer is making new previews for, and only the ones that have already been reworked are transferring to my phone.

Thoughts?

Same response here: inability to sync photos happens on both my iPhone and iPad. I wanted to sync another photo album to my phone. I get this error in iTunes: iTunes cannot sync photos to the iPhone “David's-iPhone6” because your Photos Library is not yet available. Please try again later. No syncing issues before OS X El Capitian and iOS 9.0.x

I am not storing my photos to the iCloud because I need more photo storage than what the free iCloud supports. I prefer to store and backup my photos on my own storage media.

I have turned OFF and turned ON My Photo Stream on the mac and iPhone. Rebuilt the Photo data base by holding down option and command buttons.

Tired of trying 'Sync' over and over expecting different results

Oh! I know a possible answer to this one. And it actually has absolutely nothing to do with anything cloud-related. Photos shares a long-running bug/design flaw/whatever with both iPhoto and Aperture: it only allows iTunes to see changes and rebuild the iPod Photo Cache folder if Photos is closed BEFORE iTunes is opened. In previous cases, you'd be stuck with an inability to see any changes if you opened iTunes, opened iPhoto/Aperture, did some things, then hit Sync. Now, there's a 50/50 chance that the process will die altogether, which will also prevent any other changes (app updates, new tunes, movies, TV shows, et cetera) from syncing. Simply make sure iTunes is closed, close out of Photos (you may want to wait 5-10 minutes if you've made any serious changes in the last session, such as importing a large number of photos from your camera), then open iTunes and sync.

If that doesn't work, then I'm not sure because that's how I've solved that message on three separate occasions.

Same problem with El Capitan. Photos are on iCloud but will not sync with my iMac. Sync is ok with my iPad. Sometimes the sync happens a few days later or a week later or weeks later. Unchecking and rechecking the photo stream doesn't help. Steve Jobs would be disappointed.

There's generally a background process that will run to synchronize stuff, but various things can kill it. How long do you keep Photos open to try and get it to sync? Mine usually will detect photos within minutes of my phone or iPad syncing and start downloading them. Do you have your iMac set to download originals or the optimized versions? Because the latter can cause delays, I've noticed.

I think I may have found another way to fix syncing issues. I found that the few pictures in the album that weren't syncing properly had the original files located on my portable hard drive. Playing around with the new Photos app I noticed some extra security measures were put in with the updates. I think Photos recognizes the pictures, but won't sync them because they aren't on the computers main drive/loaded directly into the Photos Library. After I copied the original photos to my computer, disconnected my portable hard drive, set those as the originals (after trying to open them in Photos and having to find them for the computer), and then re-synced my iPad, all the photos in the album managed to make it over. Not sure why it is set up like this, but I am guessing it has to do with Apples new push for all this permissions junk. Hopefully this helps others. I sure do miss the ease of iPhoto though....

This just worked for me, after I rang Apple Support:

I have a mac, iPad and iPhone.

iCloud sync was fine on my iPad and iPhone, but my mac was stuck on 7 items to download. The photos app had "placeholders" for those 7 items, but they would not download, no matter what i tried

The solution was:

Switched off my photo stream - not needed when all devices are apple

Logged in and out of icloud

went to iCloud.com on safari and downloaded the 7 photos in question to my mac

imported those into photos app

deleted the 7 placeholders in the photos app that were stuck

rebooted my mac

All fixed. Photos taken on my iPhone now show on my mac

Hope that helps someone

Correction to the above:

I logged OUT then back IN to iCloud on my Mac