Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11

After reading some of the answers, I decided to log out of iCloud on both iPhone 7 (iOS 11.2.6) & Mac (High Sierra 10.13.3). I shut down iPhone and logged back into iCloud. I logged back into iCloud on iTunes on Mac. Clicked Sync Photos check box. The albums I had previously selected to sync where still showing. I clicked Apply. All photos copied!

I just started having this problem (March 2018) with iPhone 7 (iOS 11.2.6) & iTunes on Mac (High Sierra 10.13.3). Strange, but I have an ancient iPod Classic and all photos copy over. The only thing I can get onto my iPhone are "People", no albums or other photos. Spent hours on phone with Apple Help. No solution.

After reading some of the answers, I decided to log out of iCloud on both iPhone 7 & Mac.

I shut down iPhone and logged back into iCloud. I logged back into iCloud on iTunes on Mac. Clicked Sync Photos check box. The albums I had previously selected to sync where still showing. I clicked Apply. All I wanted photos copied! Everything looks perfect.

Seems to be fixed in iOS 11.4 and iTunes 12.7.4 and also seems OK with iTunes 12.7.5

Just to confirm that the problem does seem to be fixed with iOS 11.4 with iTunes 12.7.4 on my wife's iMac, synching to her iPhone7 and her iPad Mini. No problems on my iMac with iPhone7 and iPad Pro 2nd Generation.

After updating the iPhone and iPad to iOS11.4, to restore the synch from her free-standing library of photos on the iMac HD (not in Photos on the Mac), I did the following:

1. On the iPhone and iPad, go to Settings and open the iCloud settings.

2. Selected iCloud and then Photos and turned iCloud Photo Library On and then immediately Off.

3. On the Mac, opened the directory containing the photos to be synched and deleted the AppleTV Photo Cache (not everyone may have this) and the iPod Photo Cache.

4. Connected the iPhone and carried out a successful synch of all photographs.

5. Repeated steps 1, 2 and 4 with the iPad mini and carried out a successful synch of all photographs.

I then updated the iMac to iTunes 12.7.5 and repeated the synch without problem.

Thanks to everyone who persisted with reporting this issue to Apple.

John

iOS 12 resolved all of my photo syncing issues. I'm on iTunes 12.9.0.164. iOS 11 killed the syncing but iOS 12 works flawlessly. I even tested it by adding and removing pictures and albums. All good now on iPad and iPhone.

I think your issues will be resolved if you upgrade to iOS 12. You will lose FaceTime Live Photos which really hurts. That is one feature I used all the time.

Hi all,

I have been monitoring this thread and tried all the things suggested to no avail.

My photos where appearing as allocated icons (but with no preview) in my Photo app, but consistently was not able to retrieve via updates even when connected to wifi and plenty of space and latest ios and itunes. Although logging into my iCloud via browser, I know my old photos they did exist in the cloud, they were not being uploaded to my Iphone x. Restoring from backup also didnt work, with the some state as before, post update.

The only way I found to be able to repopulate my iphone x photos (around 40k photos), is by fresh set up iphone as a new iphone. This forced, as I believe corrupted memory allocations of the photos to be wiped permanently, and pull from icloud freshly. As my other important apps such as WhatsApp etc have their own backups, the pain is merely installing my apps again which is worth it as I can now access all my photos.

I hope this helps everyone and apologies if this is a workaround that has already been suggested. I'm just relieved to have the photos back and not have to wait for Apple for an official fix, which probably involved freshing wiping all photos and re-retreiving anyway.

Regards,

Tez

Got things working! ;-)

Problem: iPhone stuck uploading (comparing/checking) iCloud data

Solution: signing out of iCloud, waiting a couple hours, then signing in

At least, I “think” that’s what did it. Here’s some of the other changes I made:

-Off iCloud photo share

-on summarize photos

-after signing out of iCloud, force restart, enter pin, let it sit for awhile

-proper shutdown, turn on, enter pin, leave it alone for awhile

-wait at least a couple, maybe three?

-shutdown, plug in power cable, turn on

I'm 99% sure it was the sign out, wait awhile, then sign in. I've been told many many times from apple dudes to sign out, then sign in...but that doesn't really ever seem to work.

Not only did this restore iCloud photos, but handoff and universal clipboard are working ipad~macbook~iphone. I haven't tested browser history, but at least that's all working.

Hope this helps :-)

Hello guys after a lot of month maybe I solved the question!

1- on Mac go to your Photo library File system, right click, select "Show package contents", trash folder "iPod photo cache" and empty the trash

2 - then, always Mac, click "alt "+ "command" + "left mouse click" on Mac Photo app to repair your library (make a backup first)

3- After 1 and 2 restart your Mac and iOS device

4- open Photo app on Mac and leave it opened

5- link iOS device to Mac, open iTunes, go to "sync photo" and WAIT half an hour or 1 hour ( depends from the capacity of your library) till iTunes load all photos of library WITHOUT SYNCING

6- after this time you can CLICK on SYNC BUTTON

This proceedings solved problem you talked in this discussion!

I hope this will solve for all of you.

Good Bye and Good Luck!

Good news!!!

Yesterday I installed iOS 11.2.5 beta 5 in my iPad Air and macOS 10.13.2 Supplemental Update in my iMac. For first time in more than 3 months, today I have been able to sync my 16000 photos with no problems. Not sure if the macOS update helped, probably it doesn't because it is a security update to mitigate attacks from Meltdown and Spectre, but who knows... Finally worked. I cannot believe it!

It didn't work the first try, because I had a previous unfinished sync in my iPad, but once I deleted the 200 synced photos using some tricks posted here (syncing a small album that worked right, then unselecting the Photos syncing, and after that switching iCloud sync on and then off) and after reseting my iPad, It worked perfectly.

I reported this to Apple (UK) back in October last year. Photo sync would either simply drop out, or I'd get an internal device error message or it would say cancelling sync before it got to the end. Syncs music & movies fine but fails on the photos - have albums with 0 pictures, pictures in the wrong albums, iPads are telling me there's masses more photos on there than are actually visible, sometimes it syncs 1000, 2000, 3000 photos before failing, other times it's on hundreds.... all very frustrating. I went through Apple Support initially who escalated it to a higher level team. They spent nearly two weeks ringing me back and trying various "ideas" to fix the problem, each call was well over an hour as they were remotely watching exactly what was happening. My iMac, 2 iPads & Macbook Pro were all checked for bugs/issues and found to be clean and functioning correctly. After extensive testing they concluded it's a bug (in ios 11) and escalated the issue to their Engineering/Dev Team who will apparently work on a fix. They also said they'd be in touch again but it's now February and I'm still waiting, as are you all. I now read the "fixes" list on every ios update hoping that it will mention this issue but still nothing. I have a direct line for the man at Apple who was helping me and am considering ringing to see if there's any news. If I hear anything useful I'll post it.

Frustrating indeed. But I have a work around. Labor intensive but here's what you can do: Export your photos from Mac Photos to an SD card using a USB card reader. Use an SD card formatted in your camera with a DCIM folder installed and put the photos inside the DCIM folder. This is important because the iPad photos app expects to see an SD card formatted by your camera, ie., the DCIM folder. If you don't use a camera you can create a folder on the SD card titled DCIM when you plug it into your Mac card reader. File naming conventions need to be the same format as that utilized by your camera. You will then need the $29.00 Apple Lightning camera card reader dongle to plug into your iPad to read the SD card. An import window will appear and from there you can "import all" or select the photos you want to import. After import, you can select the "last import" folder and click on "add to" to move pictures to existing folders or you can create a new folder after selecting the "add to" function. Yes this is labor intensive and it will take time if you need to get all 50K of you pics onto the iPad but it gets you there in the interim until Apple can get us there with a software fix.

I noticed that when I synced my iPad the Photos would transfer, get to about 500-600 and then the sync would stop. But when I started another sync just after, the total number of photos to sync had gone down by about 300 or so.... I had almost 7,000 photos and it must have taken me 25-35 syncs, but eventually they all went in...... Not ideal, but at least the photos went in eventually. I didn't change any settings to get this to work - it just did.....

I am using iOS 11.4 beta 2, Mac OS 10.13.4 and iTunes 12.7.4.76. I Did the second iPad I had trouble with using a different machine and different library. Using the photos library and with “All photos and albums” selected, it did not sync any additional changes I had previously made to the library. I then selected “selected albums” and then “all albums.” It then picked up the most of the changes. I then re-selected “all photos and albums” and did another sync and all was fully copied correctly. Seems what I had to do is maybe more of a function of the photos library on my Mac itself which is just a guess on my part.

Now, feeling brave, I turned on iCloud photo sync to delete all my albums and pics from my first iPad Pro. I then tried to sync using “all photos and albums” but it would not sync a single pic. uhoh. Well, I next selected “selected albums”, “all albums” and started the sync. After taking a few minutes to read the library, it started to copy 16k pics and did so without stopping And the iPad was stable during the copy. When finished, there were still some pics missing so I again selected “all photos and albums” and restarted the sync where it synced the remaining 2000ish completely. All albums and picture counts are reflective of my MacOS photos library. At least the cancelling sync and internal device error messages did not appear.

I can confirm the bug is solved in iOS 11.4 beta 2!!! My 16k photos and about 300 albums synced perfectly on first try for first time in 8 months!!! Tested with my iPad Air and Photos from my iMac running last version of macOS and iTunes.

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update... I've updated to iOS 11.4 Developer Beta 3, also updated Windows 10 to April Update.

No improvement on the photo sync after the updates. Still had to toggle ON/OFF the iCloud Photo Library Sync, AND delete the iPod Photo Cache folder before doing a new sync, and that will clear everything related to photos/albums on the iPad, then the sync (I mean transferring of all the desired photos, not just incremental changes) should proceed smoothly. Again, depending on your number of albums or photos, this might take a long time (on my i7, it takes about 1 hour for 5000 photos)

I did a normal iTunes update to 12.7.5.9, followed by iPhone and iPad update to 11.4 (via iTunes, not incremental via iOS), intiated a sync... New photos were transferred (could see them under the Photos tab) but album names in Albums tab did not match the OS Photos app. All I did was sync again. Second sync and everything is perfect.

To be clear, I did not empty any cache or reset the iOS Photos app, etc; just did the updates and after 2 syncs, all good.