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

Beta software worked for me too. 7 months of frustration and finally!! Note that I turned on iCloud photo first to delete all my photos, then once they were gone turned back off, all before syncing.

iMazing is a good iTunes alternative. Personally I still prefer iTunes; maybe there’s a bit of Stockholm Syndrome about the whole thing but when it works it works well. I just wish Apple would a) stop making changes to the UI just for the sake of it and b) patch those annoying bugs a little faster.

But if you reach the point where iTunes has annoyed you one too many times, try iMazing.

I'm quite relieved to find this thread. I just upgraded from an iPad Air to a second hand iPad Air 2 which I drove 200 miles to get and was having all kinds of problems trying to synch my photos and music - getting a repeated internal device error made me think that I had bought a dodgy iPad.

It's a long thread so I haven't read it all - suffice to say that of my 9,000+ photos and 8,400 songs, a hundred or so seemed to synch at a time before a failure of some sort and the non-synched songs would appear grey. I had the idea that repeated synching might eventually work but I felt that something was fundamentally wrong so I deployed all my diagnostic experience by trying different USB cables, synching via WiFi, deleting playlists etc. etc.

So, anyway, I am back to just hammering away with repeated synchs to see if I can get all my songs and photos on there eventually - maybe even before iOS 11.4 is released.

The newest beta update reverted back to error. It won’t read new picture folders properly. It will copy the pictures but not make the folder visible bit it can be found by doing a search. It does update all other folders.

A poster on the “slow sync” thread here Re: Slow Sync between iPhone & Computer is saying that the latest iTunes fixes that problem. Between that and iOS 11.4 it looks as though Apple may finally have nailed these two persistent bugs.

I won’t be in a position to test this for a couple of days but here's hoping. Even if it is fixed, the time take to do so is ridiculous. These sorts of delays are what lead many Apple users to delay applying updates in case they break something for months on end. This is not good for security or for PR. And of course people who buy new devices are stuck with the latest version of whatever OS they’re running, bugs and all. This isn’t the user-focused Apple I used to know.

Sorry for the mini-rant but I feel more disillusioned with Apple every time one of these edge-case but persistent bugs shows up. Apple still make fantastic hardware and integrate it beautifully with the software, but that software is increasingly flaky and their customer support increasingly slow and opaque. It's very disappointing.

I wouldn’t update to 11.2. I didn’t have this problem until l updated. I suspect it has something to do with iCloud defaulting to on - once l upgraded to 11.2. That’s what started this mess.

Paardeslager,

The slow reading photos problem began with the latest iTunes update… only to make matters worse. It’s an iTunes issue.

It work in small increments but you have to resync over and over and if you have thousands of photos it takes foreverit took me a long time.

How did others install beta?

I am having the very same problem too....since updating to IOS 11 then ISO 11.1 I’ve had nothing but trouble !!

on top of the music issue...I cannot get on to my photo albums whilst using messenger or on Facebook.....I’m ready to throw everything in the bin !!

I’m not technical at all, so am desperate for help to resolve these issues.

Good luck everyone 😉😫😩

I also have the same problem, its slightly reassuring to know Im not the only one and it sounds like a bug in the new OS. However I dont know how you can sync the photos in 'batches'. I have around 5,000 photos to sync how can i get them onto the iPad? Any help much appreciated. Will I need to do this each time I want to update my iPad?

Thanks for the advice.

I have spent 3 days on this and lost over 34,000 photos from my iPad (5th Gen IOS 11.0.3).

Luckily they are backed up and also on my iMac which I am trying to sync with.

First I was getting error message "failed to sync" now I'm getting "internal device error" however, I have managed to sync 1413 photos (oddly only ones from 2015?) - running it again now i have moved to 2115 photos with some now from 2014! Before it failed.

So I will continue working on it unless apple come up with a fix before then.

I've been having the same problem with both my iPad Pro 9.7 & my wife's Air 2.

Firstly, we should not need to re-sync photos after a software update but all too often photos already on the devices are "scrambled" by the update, appearing in different albums or missing completely. Apple have had the same issue with iOS updates on a regular basis for ages and I'm tired of complaining to them about it. Does anybody there actually beta test these updates before inflicting them on their customers?

This new issue with iOS not syncing more than around 300 photos at a time just compounds what was already an annoying problem. Now to restore photos after an update has corrupted them, instead of just letting iTunes do its thing for a few hours, you have to constantly monitor it & hit "sync" again every time it stops. Sometimes that's not enough & you need to disconnect & reconnect the iPad to initiate the sync from the start which means going through the interminable backup delay. I had about 16,000 photos on both of our iPads but no way am I going through this nightmare to restore them all; I'll just use the Google Photos app to look at them in the cloud or view them on my NAS when at home.

This is really amateur stuff from a company that claims to make technology easier to use. I have no such issues with my Android devices... just sayin'

Update: I was rebooting my iPad and restarting iTunes every time it stopped syncing. But it works just as well to just to eject the iPad, unplug it, and then plug it back in. And it's back to sending the internal device error message after every batch of 300 photos or so.