Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11

I finally found a technician that seems to have provided a solution. The physics still updating but it has already downloaded thousands more photos than any other solution. It requires the dreaded factory reset. Then setting up the phone as a new phone - not signing into iCloud at this stage (later). After the process is complete you go back and sign into your iCloud and do the backup. It appears there is a bug resident in the software. Fingers crossed that this is the final solution. I’m not sure yet as I’m still unable to install the 11.2 update because I get a message indicating the system is still downloading.

While we wait for a fix from Apple for USB sync... I've stumbled upon a work around. I don't know if this has been discussed here (I apologize if it has), and many of you may already know about it. But, you can create shared albums in the Photos app on the Mac and they will appear on your other devices via iCloud photo sharing (NOT iCloud photo library). Instructions: Make sure you have "iCloud photo sharing" turned on in Preferences on your Mac. Launch the Photos app on your Mac and in the left panel of the Photos app, hover over "shared albums" and a "+" sign appears for you to click on and create a new album. Name it and drag photos into it and the albums (with pics) will automatically appear on all your devices. Repeat for as many albums as you wish. There are two detractors with this: 1) the albums appear chronologically on your devices in the reverse order they are created - newest to oldest, i.e., you can't alphabetize order - not good for those of us who want albums organized in a specific order. And whenever you add a new photo to a shared album on the Mac, the album will then move to the top of the order. 2) Because this sync occurs via iCloud (vs. iTunes USB/Wifi sync) the resolution for each picture is less than the original and optimized for the screen size of the iPad or iPhone.

This may not the best solution for you all, but perhaps the only solution we have for the interim until Apple provides a software fix.

Now that Apple has finished their higher priority 11.2 new features list (apple pay cash, fast wireless charging, etc) maybe they can now focus on bug fixes in the iOS software. I remain optimistic and hopeful that the fix is coming given the large quantity of open case numbers being reported here.

I've had this problem on my iPhone X and an iPhone 7 both running the latest iOS 11 and iTunes 12.7.

However, here's what I discovered to fix the problem today. I even did the same steps on my wife's iPhone7 and fixed it as well. The problem was that when I tried to sync just a couple of folders of pictures, the folders themselves would get set up on the iPhone, but no pictures would be in them.

At one point, I had synced my complete photo library which was about 29GB. After stopping the sync of photos, I started seeing clues that the sync never removed those files as it said it did. When I plugged my phone into the computer and opened iTunes, the space indicator still showed 29GB of photos at the bottom of iTunes, but on the phone in Photos/Albums, they were all gone. I had wondered how to delete all of the pictures in the special folders People & Places and couldn't find a way. When I would go into General/iPhone Storage, it showed 29GB of Photos. I don't routinely use iCloud, but went to Settings/Apple ID/iCloud and turned on Photos. the Phone then gave me a message that it would delete all of the local photos (29GB, 28,000 pictures) before starting iCloud backup. Well, that was the answer. I did have to turn it on and off a couple of times for it to delete all of the pictures. Going back to Photo Albums proved that all of those pictures were indeed gone. Last step, I synced two picture folders AND, they now have all of the photos in those two folders on the iPhone as they should be.

I called Apple and opened a support case. It was almost immediately escalated to a senior tech and he contacted the engineers who confirmed this was a known issue and they should release a new version with a fix as soon as they can. I was eventually able to get all of the photos synced, but it took restarting the sync about 10 times.

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.

i updated to iTunes 12.7.5, and updated to iOS 11.4. After the updates, I synced my iPad. The majority, but not all, of my photos were copied. The next morning, I initiated a second sync. It appears that all 30,000 of my photos synced correctly after the second sync. I did not empty any cache or reset my iPad. I have not tried to sync my iPhone 8 yet. Hopefully this nightmare is over.

It has taken over 8 months to fix this sync problem....miracles have happened..synced my photos on iPad and iPhone after updating to iOS 11 and latest iTunes.

hHad to turn iCloud off and did normal sync via iTunes and USB connection and it has worked without a hitch!

I had handled my photos a different way while this was happening and had only stored around half my photos in Mac Photos albums. I will now put the rest into Photos albums and hope to sync them all to iPad and iPhone. As it worked today with half my collection, I think it will do the lot when I have put the others Back into photos.

ang

Finally IOS 11.4 has fixed this problem. All 35000+ photos on my iMac (in iPhoto because Photos is still a joke for anyone who really wants to organise their images) have synced to my iOS 11 devices. My older iPad, iPhone and iPod still running iOS 10 or earlier never had a problem.

What is surprising is that the release notes for iOS 11.4 do not acknowledge that this was ever an issue. It’s almost as if Apple finally realised that their sneaky plan to force everyone into paid cloud storage wasn’t going to work so they flicked the switch to make local syncing work again. Users 1 Corporation 0.