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photos not ready syncing iPhone el capitan

iPhone will not sync photos in El Capitan. Says photos not ready.

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 5:40 PM

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17 replies

Oct 2, 2015 7:03 AM in response to Markl116

After installing El Capitan, tried to sync my iPhone & iPad via iTunes manually while connected using lightning cable - not iCloud, (for the record, I have a several Photos Library albums selected to sync between my devices and the Photos Library); I get error message "iTunes cannot sync phots to the iPad (or to iPhone) because your Photos Library is not yet available. Please try again later." If i deselect "sync Photos" then the sync works as you'd expect - backup, music, books, etc... it seems to get stuck during the "importing photos" step. I've spoken to Apple Tech Support about this and they had me try multiple fixes including re-install of iTunes 12.3, restarts, rebuild of Photos Library, different lighting cable, permissions fixes, Disk Utility First Aid, selected 1 album to sync as a test - all failed. My guess is there is a glitch with El Capitan since this issue only began after the install. Will soon try to create a new Photos Library to see if the problem recurs there, though, that won't tell us much from my experience. I have a large 1.05TB Photos Library running on iMac Retina 5K.

Oct 3, 2015 8:29 AM in response to Markl116

Same problem. I have El Capitan and iPhone 6 Plus. Connecting my phone to my Macbook Pro and the Photos app opens to the import screen, but there are no previews of the photos I have on my iPhone and the Import Selected and Import All buttons are greyed out because the Photos app doesn't detect any of the photos on the phone. Worked before El Capitan. Definite bug. We need to officially report this.

Oct 3, 2015 8:29 AM in response to Neil Egan

You've probably already called Apple Tech Support, but if not, I suggest we all do that - request to speak to upper level tech and request that they send you the diagnostics report for engineering to help figure out what we all have in common so this can get resolved hopefully in an OS X update. The process takes a few minutes to run and then upload the finished report to them, they'll walk you thru it but I think it's worth it in the end.

Oct 3, 2015 8:35 AM in response to curtiscee.apple

Curtiscee - I'm not sure this is the same issue as what this forum is having - the issue we're having is on the iTunes side for syncing Photos - albums - to put onto the iPhone or iPad and the sync gets hung up. I have noticed a similar thing to what you are talking about, though: have you tried manually selecting your iPhone 6 Plus from the Photos Library sidebar? I know it used to automatically go to the connected device, and I've noticed that more often than not since El Capitan I do have to manually select it in sidebar then I can import selected pics.

Oct 4, 2015 11:12 AM in response to Markl116

Just spent some time talking to a very helpful Apple support person about this topic. He had me attach my iPhone to the computer, and then restart the computer. After the computer started back up again, I saw a little message pop up on my iPhone asking whether or not to trust the computer. When I hit "Allow", all my photos showed up again in the Photos app. He spoke to an Apple software engineer who said this is expected when both the iPhone and the computer have been updated recently. They basically stop trusting each other!

Oct 7, 2015 3:38 PM in response to Markl116

I was able to get it to sync by deselecting all photos and albums. Then I found an album with only one photo in it. Then I found where I can select a different fold then my photo library. then switched it back and selected the album with one photo. I synced up. This sort of fiddling around is always a bit worrisome. I of course ran a full back up on an external drive beforehand. It did work for two days, but last night the same old error message was back.

Nov 9, 2015 11:27 PM in response to Markl116

I have the same problem. I have tried all the solutions listed in forum, with no avail.


All worked fine until El Capitan came along. I have had problems with Mail, Office for Mac, iPhone. I moved away from MS-DOS five years ago when nothing seemed to work, and Apple 'just worked'. Now it seems that Apple no longer 'just works'. All the things I use in my workalike no longer work, or only work after significant trouble-shooting. I am losing confidence in Apple.

photos not ready syncing iPhone el capitan

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