All Photos Albums Disappeared Across All Devices

Question

All Photos Albums Disappeared Across All Devices

I woke up this morning and noticed that all of my Photos albums stored on iCloud completely disappeared.

They are gone on my three Mac desktops, iPhone, iPad, and also on iCould.

I did nothing between the time I noticed they were there until I noticed they were gone.

I have well over 20,000 photos in albums and all of the albums that I have these images in are gone.

Not one single album I created is still there, just the default ones.

The photos are still in the main library.

I restored my main photos library from a Time Machine backup but once it connects to iCould, the albums disappear again but my 20,000 images are still in the library.

I also did create a Test Album and that did work.

I am using the the very latest iOS and a mix of the latest two Mac OS.

Posted on Sep 26, 2016 1:54 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,879 points

Sep 27, 2016 1:13 PM in response to James Johnson14

Did you recently enable iCloud Photo Library on an iOS device?

I had exactly the same happen after I enabled iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone. A day later all albums and smart albums were gone from iCloud and all my four Macs.

When I search for the name of an album, in Photos on one of the Macs, the photos from that album will be shown and I can recreate the album.

If you lost many albums, try to restore your Photos Library from a backup, once the iCloud sync has finished for all your devices.

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Answer 2

Sep 27, 2016 1:28 PM in response to léonie

Thanks...this was what I was hoping that I was able to do.

However, I restored the Photos library twice on two different machines and as soon as I did, they were deleted again. It seems that the Cloud based Photos is controlling it and it will not let me change it unless I start over.

Test folders seem to work okay if I create it on iCloud.com. However, with 20,000 images, that will take forever. I still have my Time Machine back-ups of the old library.

When I went in to work, I fired up Photos and I could watch the folders disappear.

I did not add another device. Everything I have enabled has been sharing images for quite a while now.

Thanks!

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Answer 3

skata4u

Level 1

23 points

Sep 27, 2016 6:45 PM in response to James Johnson14

Also has happen to me, lucky for a Backup! Ive posted my journey here:

Re: iCloud Photos not syncing to iOS

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Answer 4

skata4u

Level 1

23 points

Dec 21, 2016 2:50 AM in response to skata4u

Have you had any luck still? Its the third time Ive restored and the Albums have disappeared. I have created a SMART album in Photos on MacOS and all my 12k photos are in there now as the albums have deleted themselves!!

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