skata4u
Level 1 (20 points)
Photos for Mac

Q: iCloud Photos not syncing to iOS

Hi all

 

I have made a heap of changes on my macOS Sierra Photos including:

  • Changing names of Albums
  • Merging some albums

 

None of those changes are replicating to my iPhone 6 (iOS 10). Also now half of my albums are showing as having 0 photos which is incorrect.

 

Was working fine a couple of days ago.

 

Anyone have any recommendations before I try turning OFF iCloud Library on the iPhone and turning it back on ? Anyone else have this happen to them?

Posted on Sep 20, 2016 5:55 PM

by skata4u,Apple recommended
skata4u skata4u
Level 1 (20 points)
Photos for Mac
A:

Thought I would just update everyone.

 

I have spent a lot of time on the phone to a Photos Product specialist at Apple. They have engineering looking at this for me but we have taken the following steps:

 

  1. Turn off iCloud Photo Library from all devices.
  2. Restore a backup of my photos library from 2 days earlier that had the albums in tact (THANKS HEAPS LEONIE!!!)
  3. Goto iCloud.com and delete all photos on the cloud (this took ages to do!)
  4. I think the culprit was my phone as some have mentioned here - so I have wiped my phone and set it up as NEW. Not restored from a backup. Apple advised you should be able to turn it OFF and ON when you like, and your camera roll should return exactly how it was.
  5. Now its time to re-upload my whole library again (100GB!) which will take about 10 days for me.

Posted on Sep 26, 2016 3:31 AM

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skata4u

Q: iCloud Photos not syncing to iOS

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  • Helpful answers

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  • by LarryHN,

    LarryHN LarryHN Sep 20, 2016 6:06 PM in response to skata4u
    Level 10 (84,857 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 20, 2016 6:06 PM in response to skata4u

    Best guess is patience - give it time  - you have had Sierra installed for just a few hours - syncs are not instantaneous and a "heap" of changes will take a "heap" of time to sync

     

    and generally the absolute worst thing in the world to do is turn iCloud Photo Library  and turn it back on - that should be only a last resort

     

    LN

  • by skata4u,

    skata4u skata4u Sep 20, 2016 6:16 PM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (20 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 20, 2016 6:16 PM in response to LarryHN

    Thanks Larry, appreciate your help here Quick one, why is it the "absolute worst thing" to flick it off then back on (on the iPhone)? I don't mind it re downloading all the optimised photos.

     

    Its just last night my laptop was on wifi the whole night (saying everything was updated in the pref.pane for Photos itself) and phone was also on charge connected to wifi all night and still showed these 0 photo albums.

  • by LACAllen,

    LACAllen LACAllen Sep 20, 2016 7:21 PM in response to skata4u
    Level 5 (5,003 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 20, 2016 7:21 PM in response to skata4u

    I don't mind it re downloading all the optimised photos.

    You would be in the minority I think.

     

    We get contributions here from users who are chafed it takes more than 15 minutes to sync their 30,000 image photo libraries.

  • by LarryHN,

    LarryHN LarryHN Sep 20, 2016 8:30 PM in response to skata4u
    Level 10 (84,857 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 20, 2016 8:30 PM in response to skata4u

    because it is slow - for me uploading everything (about 20,000 photos and videos) takes over a week and until it finishes nothing really works - you do what you want - I suggest patience is the best plan and if you turn off ICPL and turn it back on it will takes even longer to get things back to steady state

     

    LN

  • by skata4u,

    skata4u skata4u Sep 21, 2016 12:11 AM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (20 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 21, 2016 12:11 AM in response to LarryHN

    Torally understand, however I am not talking about turning it off my Mac, just my iPhone.

     

    Anyway, i went ahead and turned it off on the iPhone, and out of the 14k photos, 2.5k have still remained on the iPhone (all of them in the Camera roll & theres a heap of albums that have still remained). I want to wipe the ******* totally clear of all Photos, then turn it back on

  • by léonie,Helpful

    léonie léonie Sep 23, 2016 4:15 AM in response to skata4u
    Level 10 (107,629 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 23, 2016 4:15 AM in response to skata4u

    Turning iCloud Photo Library off and on my iPhone erased and deleted all my albums completely on all my macs with Sierra. Do not do this, unless you have a full backup of your Photos library so you can the albums by restoring the library.

    If half of your albums are showing no items at all on your Mac, wait for the current syncing to finish and if still photos are missing from your albums, restore your photos library on the Mac from your last backup that still has  the albums. But do not toggle iCloud Photo Library on and off on the iPhone.

    The first sync of albums across devices seems to be buggy in Sierra.

  • by skata4u,

    skata4u skata4u Sep 21, 2016 1:09 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (20 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 21, 2016 1:09 AM in response to léonie

    That doesnt make sense Leonie. iOS explicitly says (a couple of times actually when you toggle it off) that this will remove photos only from the phone and NOT from iCloud. You should call Apple if its actually gone and deleted your library on a Mac, when you toggled it off on the Phone.

     

    To throw another scenario into the mix, I logged into iCloud.com using a browser on PC, and the photos are out of sync on that (consistently says "Updating"). Im thinking i need to do a FULL wipe of iCloud Photo Library, and re-upload the 70GB library. Anyway to do this? (Again i dont care that it took 10 days to upload, if I know it will start fresh and do a clean job)

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Sep 21, 2016 1:58 AM in response to skata4u
    Level 10 (107,629 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 21, 2016 1:58 AM in response to skata4u

    I did not say my library and the photos have been deleted on the Mac -

    I said, the albums created on the Macs in Photos for Mac,  and synced to icloud, from my macs - these albums vanished completely after I enabled iCloud photo library on the iPhone. The photos are still in iCloud and on all devices, but the custom structure in the album section is gone - all folders, all smart albums, all standard albums. There have been a few other reports here reporting the same behaviour, that albums have been removed from the Mac after syncing with a new iOS device started.

    I noticed that all folders vanished completely from Macs, that contained smart albums.   The smart albums seem to trigger this bug, probably because the iPhone and iPod do not support smart albums.   The only folder left is the "iPhoto Events" folder, but it has only empty albums.

     

    Just be careful and do not start an iCloud Photo Library sync  on the iPhone, without having a backup of your albums, since you invested much work into this structure.

  • by rafa1980,

    rafa1980 rafa1980 Sep 21, 2016 8:08 PM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 21, 2016 8:08 PM in response to léonie

    I had this problem when started using iOS 10 beta. After updating my iPhone, my albums simply vanished from the cloud and all of my devices. Contacted apple who said they couldn't provide support since I was in beta. Seems the bug is still there.

     

    Since then I turned it off, wipe it clean, restore my library on El Capitan and upgraded to Sierra. Turned back on iCloud Photos and I'm waiting for the whole library to be uploaded.

     

    But I've already checked Photos from iCloud.com and there's no signal of my albums. Will wait until the library is fully uploaded but it seems there's a bug on Photos in iOS 10 and Maços Sierra.

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Sep 22, 2016 12:26 AM in response to rafa1980
    Level 10 (107,629 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 22, 2016 12:26 AM in response to rafa1980

    Thanks for the confirmation.  Have you also been using smart albums in addition to standard albums?

    I wonder if my smart albums triggered this buggy behavior.

     

    The Photos Help says smart albums are not stored in iCloud Photo Library, (https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/phtf5e48489c)

    Note: iCloud Photo Library keeps your photos and videos up to date but doesn’t store your projects or Smart Albums. To keep a backup of these items, make sure you back up your Photos library to another storage device.

    But smart albums used to sync between Macs, as described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204486

    And when I test with new smart albums, they do sync with iCloud Photo Library between Macs,only not to my iPhone.

    After you sign in, these items appear in the Photos app on all of your Mac computers:

    • All original photos and videos
    • All folders and albums
    • Smart Albums
    • Keywords
    • Memories
    • Key photo selections

    Interesting - Memories are supposed to sync,  but the searchable faces tags are also no longer mentioned.

  • by rafa1980,

    rafa1980 rafa1980 Sep 22, 2016 8:38 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 22, 2016 8:38 AM in response to léonie

    No Leonie, all albums where created manually. Will take a couple of days to fully upload my 260 GB library but still no sign of albums on icloud.com

     

    Will open a case with Apple.

  • by skata4u,

    skata4u skata4u Sep 23, 2016 4:25 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (20 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 23, 2016 4:25 AM in response to léonie

    Well well well, this just happened to me!

  • by skata4u,

    skata4u skata4u Sep 23, 2016 4:36 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (20 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 23, 2016 4:36 AM in response to léonie

    léonie wrote:

     

    Turning iCloud Photo Library off and on my iPhone erased and deleted all my albums completely on all my macs with Sierra. Do not do this, unless you have a full backup of your Photos library so you can the albums by restoring the library.

    If half of your albums are showing no items at all on your Mac, wait for the current syncing to finish and if still photos are missing from your albums, restore your photos library on the Mac from your last backup that still has  the albums. But do not toggle iCloud Photo Library on and off on the iPhone.

    The first sync of albums across devices seems to be buggy in Sierra.

    Yep this just happened to me!!! My mac now has 10,000 photos not in an album and half of my albums are gone! lucky i had a backup of my Photos library 2 days ago.

     

    Was thinking to restore from my Library backup from 2 days ago, but stuff that, I've logged a callback from Apple tomorrow. I want them to raise an incident not heir behalf and get this FIXED. This is just pathetic on their behalf to have issues like this.

     

    Leonie -do you have links to other people that have encountered this? I'll let the rep know......as you should be able to turn it off and on any time you like.

  • by skata4u,Apple recommended

    skata4u skata4u Sep 26, 2016 3:31 AM in response to skata4u
    Level 1 (20 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Sep 26, 2016 3:31 AM in response to skata4u

    Thought I would just update everyone.

     

    I have spent a lot of time on the phone to a Photos Product specialist at Apple. They have engineering looking at this for me but we have taken the following steps:

     

    1. Turn off iCloud Photo Library from all devices.
    2. Restore a backup of my photos library from 2 days earlier that had the albums in tact (THANKS HEAPS LEONIE!!!)
    3. Goto iCloud.com and delete all photos on the cloud (this took ages to do!)
    4. I think the culprit was my phone as some have mentioned here - so I have wiped my phone and set it up as NEW. Not restored from a backup. Apple advised you should be able to turn it OFF and ON when you like, and your camera roll should return exactly how it was.
    5. Now its time to re-upload my whole library again (100GB!) which will take about 10 days for me.
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