The ipad cannot be synced. An internal device error occurred.

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Life is much better - iOS 11.4 and iTunes 12.5 appear to have corrected many sync issues, including this one, and the dreaded "reading Pictures" infinite stall ... gracias, Apple.

I am having this same problem. My iPad will copy a few hundred photos and then stop and post and internal error message on my screen. Super annoying. I always sync thousands of photos to my iPad. It's taking me all day to do this, a few hundred at a time. And I also have done a hard iPad reboot, restarted iTunes, tried different backup methods, etc. Still getting the error message. This only began with iOS 11.

I have the same problem. While updating to 10.3.3 my iPad crashed and I had to go back to factory settings and downloaded 11.0.3 instead. Now every time I try to sync my photos it sends about 300 more pictures and then stops. The first few of times I got the internal device error message. Then I tried changing my auto-lock timeout from 2 minutes to 15 minutes. Now after sending another batch of photos iTunes just stops syncing. (Only 30 more cycles and I should have everything downloaded!)

I am having the same problem and working with apple for a week on this. How come they don't tell us that lots of people are having this problem. Its clearly the software update. Anyone know how to fix, or when it will be fixed? I have been working with someone at apple for a week on it, and its never been made clear to me that others are having this exact problem- lots of others!

I don't think the issue is iTunes. I think it's iOS 11.1.2. I haven't updated my iPhone from 11.1.1 and it's working fine. However, my iPad was updated to 11.1.2 and that's when the problem began. I expect it will be corrected in a future iOS update. I would expect it within the next month as Apple always expects to sell a lot of iOS devices during the holidays and I'm sure they want to avoid the huge disappointment (and possible product returns) this bug would cause new owners....especially on top of the HomePod delay.

I contacted them in October and sent all my diagnostic files to them. They got back in touch with me last week and said they didn't yet have a solution. I've also had this problem with my iPhone to a lesser degree (i.e. takes several syncs for photos to appear), vs. "internal device error". I'm using a new iMac, iPhone 8 and iPad Pro. It's not a hardware issue. They also said most people use iCloud. I wonder how true that is, I'd be paying a lot of $ for them to keep all my photos, and am against that in principle. May be time to move to a different photo organizer.

Thank you for starting this post. I was starting to go crazy. I have about 35,000 photos and have the exact same problem on both my iPad Air 2 and my IPad Mini 4, in each case after upgrading to iOS 11. Even worse, after I receive the dreaded error message, the iPad Air 2 then dumps all of my pictures (yes, all) and starts to retrieve them (I'm guessing that it is rebuilding an index file but don't know for sure). This uses up all of the processing power of my iPad Air 2 for about 36 hours, and during that time, the iPad Air 2 acts pretty close to a brick. Sent in unsolicited bug notice to Apple using the link in this thread, and hoping for a solution soon. At least the benefit of this thread is that I won't go nuts trying to fix it myself since I know it is a general Apple problem.

Days trying to sync 25,805 photos...about 700 at a time is what it is doing before itunes cancels the sync...Restored ipad, rebuilt the ipod photo cache, all the listed methods...(on PC syncing to ipad pro, ipad mini, iphone 7plus and iphone 6s....

Honestly, Apple has had problems with photos for a long time, years...Apple made a big deal about revamping iTunes to focus on it's "core" music stuff...it is so bad now that Apple should just stop putting cameras on their devices...Can't believe they are so deaf to peoples complaints about this.

And NO, I don't want to pay to store my photos on the "cloud" as some kind of solution....

Gonna be considering other devices and operating systems for my mobile needs...

Paardeslager,

Apple support told me that their engineers were working on it, and it would be fixed in a future update (not necessarily the next update), with no estimate on how long it would take. You are correct, we are supposed to just wait…

One thing which seems to have helped some in this is for me to turn on Automatically Back Up to iCloud in iTunes for the device. But make sure in settings that you are only doing backups to iCloud and not all the other stuff they want you to send up to the icloud.

You still have all the errors, but it only took about 25-30 reboots and a day and half to restore 25,000 photos from my pc to my ipad-mini....previously, on another ipad (ipad pro) it took a hundred or more reboots and 4-5 days to do it...

Not a solution obviously, more an observation....

Seasons Greetings to all of our big family of frustrated but ever optimistic photo syncing users... I also hope a solution is coming soon. It is and has been a very frustrating experience for all of us. We put our faith in the technology, develop systems to be able to use the equipment and then this issue. it still amazes me that a company of such size and stature has not resolved the issue yet.

I must admit after this prolonged period of being stalled in the photo syncing process i thought I would try the iCloud option. so i purchased a cloud package of 2tb, month by month so no long term commitment and i stared the upload process. I have a library of over 60,000 photos going back to 1998 organized by events by date by year. Total library size over 300g. Most pictures other than the early years taken by Pentax and the Nikon DSLR. So I started the upload and it took just short of exactly 6 days of continuous uploading, speeds ranging from 6-9mps upload speeds.

I must admit the access to my pictures now is pretty good. whenever i am on wifi i can see my album structure and load the pictures on my two iPads and my iPhone. The access on my apple tv is also very good. I also realize that there have been some commenting that perhaps this is the way Apple wishes us to go in the future, guess time will tell if i stick with the cloud option of go back to syncing when a fix is posted.

Just thought I would share my observations.

Patriot56,

I knew that I read somewhere in this forum that someone had the same problem with a new device. Clearly iOS 11 is the issue. Thanks for clearing this up!

Andrew9717,

Apole is working on the issue, but no timeline for a resolution is given. I’m losing hope!