photo albums not syncing

While your iPhone is syncing to your Mac using iTunes, go to the Photos page as shown here:

Check the "Albums" section shown at the bottom of my screen shot. Have you got the appropriate albums you wish to sync checked there (either "All albums" as shown at the very bottom of my shot, or specific albums below that)?

I ran into the same problem. Apple Support helped me solve it. What I did was:

1. Connect my iPhone to my Mac.

2. In iTunes, unchecked "sync photos" and clicked apply (choose to remove photos from iPhone).

3. Then I checked "sync photos" again and clicked apply.

That resynced all my selected albums and they appeared again in the Photos app on the Albums page like they used to.

martin21045 wrote:

I ended up reformatting by iPhone 7 ... (I did not trust restoring from a backup) ... LOST MY **** MESSAGES - some that predate the death of my wife and am now trying to figure how to get them from my MacBook Pro to the iPhone

Well, guess what ...

Those messages are in fact saved on an iPhone backup that was made when the messages were present! Restore the backup and you'll have the messages.

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

The original problem: when syncing my iPhone to my macbook pro, it picked up all the pictures from selected albums and put them into 'years' but did not form the albums like i have on my mac.

What i did:

• Followed the steps in the solution mentioned here and 'un-synced' all photos and then 're-synced' them all. i checked 'selected albums' only and made the selections of those albums i wanted on my phone.
• As a result, it erased all the albums/ photos and then installed all the albums on my phone just like i wanted.

Bigger problem: However now the albums are blank.

Please help!!

The original problem: when syncing my iPhone (version 11.2.1) to my macbook pro (OS X EI capitan version 10.11.6), I imported all the pics clicked on my phone from the 'photos' folder/ app and sorted them into the iPhotos app on my mac. Then i selected the albums i wanted on my iPhone (the rest just stay on mac). Also, i always select the 'delete after importing' option.

Normally after sync is complete, pictures would reflect in albums selected on my phone.

This time, here's what happened: it picked up all the pictures from selected albums and put them into 'years' on my phone, so they were visible, but did not form the albums like i have on my mac.

What i did next:

• Followed the steps in the solution mentioned on this thread and 'un-synced' all photos and then 're-synced' them all. i checked 'selected albums' only and made the selections of those albums i wanted on my phone.
• As a result, it erased all the albums/ photos and then installed all the albums on my phone just like i wanted.

Bigger problem: All the albums i wanted showed up but were blank (no pics).

Final solution: On cue from some of the solutions presented on a different thread, i opened 'photos' on my phone and manually added two new albums there, named them randomly and put 1 pic in each of them. Then started sync once again and voila! IT WORKED!! 😮

Hope this helps 🙂

Thanks for including the screen shot.

I don't know if this will work, but if your situation happened to me, I would try this:

Choose "Selected albums" in the screen shot you presented instead of "All photos and albums". Then select every album individually (or "all albums" if you prefer) below that where each album is listed. Then re-sync the iPhone.

I too am having problems with OS X 10.13.3 and Photos 3.0 (about 40k photos). I have a MacBook Pro 2014 and an iPhone 7 - both have up to date OS's. I do not (and will not) use any cloud service. All software and syncing was working just fine for the recent years until I finally decided that Apple likely had High Sierra working, and so I upgraded. Since then my MacBook Pro and the syncing of Photos have been unreliable: 1. my Photos keyword searches only bring up a fraction of photos with those keywords, 2. Photos does not sync photos directly to my iPhone - I have to use Air Drop. And worse - 3. while I do have many photos on my iPhone - none of the Albums synced to my iPhone have ANY photos.

All those commercials by Apple teasing Microsoft Windows come to my mind.

M

I have the exact same problem (only difference is I have 28,000 photos). I have spent hours on the phone to Apple over three different calls, I have tried everything on this post (de-syncing, only trying to sync a few albums etc), I have reinstalled Sierra, tried syncing photos from a desktop folder instead of from Photos (Apple program) and nothing works. I even bought a new iPhone hoping that would solve the problem and it didn’t. Am super frustrated as I am a massive photo lover and reference them on my iPhone all the time.

On one call to Apple, the expert technician (my issue has been escalated to an expert) advised me that ios11 has been specially designed this way and that I need to copy photos from the years to folders on my iPhone manually. I find this VERY hard to believe. If this is the case I will move to Lightroom as it syncs seamlessly for my husband.

Apple have advised they will engage an engineer and get back to me. Will let you know if I have a successful outcome.

I ended up reformatting by iPhone 7. This meant I had to reload all settings info manually (I did not trust restoring from a backup), photos and music (through iTunes), LOST MY **** MESSAGES - some that predate the death of my wife and am now trying to figure how to get them from my MacBook Pro to the iPhone (easy to do the other way, no luck with this).

I am wondering about what might have corrupted the Albums in the first place. I had bought a USB cable off eBay that I thought was buggy but it tended to work (I chucked it since), the problems seem to have started after I held off updating to High Sierra from Sierra until only recently (to 10.13.3) - wonder if Apple skipping the prior installs and going right to my current version had something to do with it? Or my finally updating the iPhone 7? Stumped.

BTW, my Apple Photos 3.0 application still cannot find and show all my photos by keyword search. Bummed out.

I had read something about that, but by the time I had done that I had backed up and overwritten the prior backup of my iPhone. I hope to stop by an Apple store to see if they can help me copy the messages, all remain on my MacBook Pro, back over to my iPhone.

Cheers,

I am having the same problem of photos copying to the iPhone but albums showing empty. In my case I have 40,000+ photos stored in hundreds of albums/folders. My desktop is running iTunes 12.7.3.46 (current as of 3/2018) on Windows 7 and the iPhoneX is running 11.2.6 (also current). I have used this approach successfully for years, but ran into the problem now when adding a few hundred photos from a recent trip. In the past failure to sync/copy photos could be tied to insufficient disk space (apparently needed temporarily during the sync process) and by freeing up more space used to clear the way for a successful sync, but no longer. I've tried every solution mentioned in this thread (short of rebuilding/restoring the phone) and none of them has worked. I also tried Lightroom, but it doesn't seem to support copying folders, just dumping all the photos into one place which makes them useless.

Based on all of us having this problem it's clear that there is a bug in iOS that we need Apple to fix. Any chance that will happen? I'm happy to provide access to my machine/data if this will help.

At the same time it would be wonderful if iOS could handle multi level folders (like having top level folders of say Asia, Americas, Europe etc.), each containing another level (Japan, China, Thailand, etc.) each containing dates (2015 03, 2016 07, etc.) with photos from that period in each case. Virtually every other computer operating system supports this basic structure, why not iOS? (I know Apple wants us all to go to the Cloud, but then why did they sell me a phone that only fills 25% of the storage capacity with 40,000 photos--so there's room for many more? Many of us don't want to transfer everything to the cloud for various reasons so why not give us the capability we need, especially since it would be easy to implement?)

I am still working with Apple to find a solution for this problem. Am in regular contact with them and I must say, their customer service is second to none, but they just can't seem to crack what the problem is. I will post something once (hopeful) they find a solution.

Thanks for the news that you're in regular contact with them. I'll look forward to hearing what your efforts with them yields. Again, if it would help them to be able to investigate another computer/iPhone with the problem, please have them get in touch.

Your "Final solution" worked for me (iPhone 5S, iTunes 12.7.4.80).

The sync used to work fine, but in recent months I'm having more and more trouble with my phone.

I doubt very much that my next phone will be an iPhone...