Albums in Photos not showing up on iPhone

Hi, I'm not sire if your problem has already been solved. But i'd like to try and suggest a solution, just in case.

If you put in many subfolders in the source folder of your photos in itunes, it won't be able to display all of it in your phone. The images are copied to your device but the album won't appear on "photos".

Try sorting them in separate folders under the source folder itself and avoid adding subfolders. That worked for me.

Rob_Earth

Are you running iOS 10.3.2, MacOS 12.10.5 and iTunes 12.6.2.20? Do you get all your albums? Also where are you syncing from - Photo? or an external HD?

I have all my photos in single folders without any subfolders, so should not have an issue. I am running 10.3.1 and will not update to 10.3.2 or higher until I see that the issue has been fixed by apple. I need my albums and I don’t need to hunt for them.

Thanks for the info, will keep watch on how this is going for you, hope you are able to get your albums

Mike

I still don't see the Albums appearing on my iPhone with iOS 10.3.3. The correct photos seem to be there, but the albums themselves don't appear as categories.

I haven't tried syncing with my iPad because that's still got all the albums, so I guess I'll just keep that photo library un-updated for a while.

have you updated iTunes to latest version 12.6.2.20? I updated my wife's iPhone 6 to 10.3.3 and since she has other issues I restored it to factory setting, restored the latest back up which included all our photos, I have clicked "all photos and albums" in iTunes. RESULT - all photos and albums are there

Yes, I'd updated to 12.6.2.20 before the latest sync, and the albums still don't appear on my iPhone. As I said before, that's after just one sync, and I've found that repeated syncs can yield dramatically different results. But right now at least all the photos I want seem to be on the iPhone, which is a pretty good result on the roulette wheel that is iTunes/iPhone syncing, so I'm probably not going to try again for a while. (On my iPhone the absence of albums isn't a big deal because I basically only sync favorites; on my iPad, where I sync far far more, it would be a big deal, and that's why I haven't done a photo sync to that for a while - and will continue not to do so.)

Oh, another thing for my experience: the albums I'm syncing aren't top-level in my Photos library on my iMac: they're both nested inside first-level folders. Léonie mentioned earlier that nested albums don't appear, although I'm not sure if mine are nested "enough" for that to be an issue. (They certainly appeared until quite recently, and are still present on my unsynced-in-a-while iPad.) Anyway, possibly top-level albums are now appearing, but second- and further level albums aren't appearing.

Question, when you click on “photos” in your sync window in iTunes, do you have “All Photos & Albums” clicked, I found that if I clicked “Selected Albums” and then click “All Albums” I got the photos and not the albums. So I went back to “All photos & Albums”

By the way I just synced another 220 photos in three albums, all photos are there as well as the Albums.

Question, when you click on “photos” in your sync window in iTunes, do you have “All Photos & Albums” clicked, I found that if I clicked “Selected Albums” and then click “All Albums” I got the photos and not the albums. So I went back to “All photos & Albums”

Just Selected Albums. There's no way any of my devices have room for all of my photos.

I have had similar issues & have been into the Genius Bar in my local mac store to try to resolve this issue. I was told at the Genius Bar that, due to the large number of photos & videos I have, I should avoid using the iCloud sync. As a result I am left having to figure out other ways around this issue. Let's not be patronizing & unhelpful here, this is a glitch that apple need to figure out. I'm sure we're not the only ones effected by this. A far more constructive way of dealing with this issue is to pass feedback up to the apple developers that many customers want the option of using conventional storage for various reasons, some associated with apples own limitations.

WRONG. I tried to use iCloud for my photos and it was a disaster. It wouldn't sync my smart albums and I couldn't edit photos in the cloud. I put everything back on my Mac (3 visits to the Genius Bar) and ended up losing all my videos in the process. I will not use iCloud for photo storage.

krepthin wrote:

WRONG. I tried to use iCloud for my photos and it was a disaster. It wouldn't sync my smart albums and I couldn't edit photos in the cloud. I put everything back on my Mac (3 visits to the Genius Bar) and ended up losing all my videos in the process. I will not use iCloud for photo storage.

it pays to read about what you are doing before you do it - iCloud Photo Library is documented not to sync smart albums and it is not a place to store photos and video but a syncing service to keep multiple libraries in sync so all changes made to any of the libraries (additions, deletions or edits) are made to all of them

LN

Systems:

iOS 10.3.3

macOS: 1012.6

iTunes 12.7

iCloud Photo sync disabled

Till today I synced my complete Photos library to my iPhone and iPad but since I manually created a new Photos library I had to resync all photos to my iOS devices again. (FYI my Photos library was 25GB but after recreating a new library with the same photos the Photos library was 15GB, imagine that 🙂

Syncing to my iPad Pro 9,7” gave no problems. All Photos library albums where shown, but when I synced to my iPhone, I only saw the photos in moments but not Albums appeared. Yet If I wanted to send a photo by mail etc I could see all albums.

OK, how did I solve this issue not seeing any albums on my iPhone.

1) In iTunes 12.7 select your device and go to Photos.

2) Enable Sync Photos but and select all photos and albums. Now all photos and albums were synced correctly.

3) Go to the Albums section and enable All Albums (or albums you like to sync).

Voila, now all photos and Album names are synced and back to my iPhone.

Now a test: I added a new album with one photo and selected “all photos and albums” at the top. Now the photo itself was synced but not the album. If I did the same as described under 3, not only the photo but also the Album was synced….

Now a new test

I deleted all photos and got a sync error. All photo where still no my iPhone but Photo sync was disabled.

Trick: Just put one album with one photo in Pictures and sync: Now iPhone with Album was synced.

and another test:

2) Enable Sync Photos and select all photos and albums. Now all photos and albums were sync correct.

So the end of the story is to do some handy panky with albums, photos and issue is solved. 🙂

It's true that the albums no longer sync automatically from iTunes on your Mac. But the pictures do sync and you can find them under photos. You can, however, create the same album by doing so on your iPhone. On your iPhone, itself if you go to Photos and then Albums there's a + sign on the top. If you press that sign, you can then create a new album. I just did it on my iPhone SE. You are asked to give it a name and so I named it with the same name as my album on Photos on my Mac. It then automatically goes to your pictures. You can then select which ones you want and then the new album is created.

It's slightly more tedious. But since I am on a fixed income, I am not ready to pay to sync all more photos through iCloud photos.

Best of Luck,

Jon

I can't tell if this has helped or not! As A reference:

Folder - a directory or folder on my Mac

Album - a group of Pics on my iPhone that have a 1 to 1 correspondence to a folder in a folder called Pictures on my Mac

Under each Album name on my iPhone there is a NOTE with this format: "# from my Mac", where the # is supposed to be the count of Pics in the Album and should be the same number as pics in the Folder on my Mac (inside the folder Pictures).

The folders on my Mac are in another folder called Pictures (as I said above). This folder is pointed to in iTunes and I have selected each folder to transfer pics to the iPhone. (yes, I manually selected over 3400 folders as you can't select them in any "normal" Mac way - such as with the Command key to select non-sequential items in a folder or the Shift key between selections in a folder.)

I have over 3400 Folders in the Photos folder on my Mac with over 120,000 items. I have some Albums in Photos on my iPhone that have the NOTE "0 from my Mac" but there are pics in that album! I also have some Albums on my iPhone that have a NOTE "# from my Mac" that are NOT the right count of Pics! So far I've only found Albums that have either one of 3 possibilites of the NOTE: 1) "0 from my Mac", 2) "# from my Mac" where # is less than the actual count of Pics in the Album, 3) "# from my Mac" where # is the correct number of Pics in the Album. I have NOT yet found an Album with more pics in the NOTE than in the Album, but I've got 3400+ to check!