Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11

Are your photos in Albums on Mac Photos and are they still in Albums when you manage to sync via this process?

i don’t use iCloud and my understanding is, icloud does not put the photos stored there into Albums...

i do not want my photo albums to be ‘destroyed’ as I want to keep them organised for easy access

ang

Hello Andrea: the reason to activate and deactivate iCloud is to force a como letra deletion of all photos in the iPhone. So, you can re-sync successfully from your pc, using iTunes. Try it. All your photos will be copied to the iPhone.

Yes, I turned off all three buttons related to iCloud photos: iCloud photo library (which I've never used), photo stream, and iCloud photo sharing and ran the test per your(s) procedure.

USB sync via iTunes used to work perfectly for my iPad air under iOS 10.3.3 but has been broken ever since iOS 11 was released, now going on almost 3 months (since September 19).

Apple: Where is the fix?!?!?!?

Trietsch,

Yes, I followed your procedure and toggled iCloud photo buttons a couple of times to make sure all photos were deleted. I did observe that even after album/picture removal there were still a few empty folders so I performed a sync with ZERO albums/photos selected and that deleted the empty folders. For my first sync, I selected a single album with 100 pics and that sync was a success. All subsequent syncs failed. I repeated the toggle process to wipe the iPad again and tried an initial sync with 4 folders and 850 pics. That was a no go. So, I can get a small initial sync to work but no subsequent syncs and no large initial syncs. So it would appear that since it works for the iPhone but not the iPad, it looks like there is a software difference between iPad and iPhone iOS11 software files.

trietsch and Cicero2k,

Thank you folks. This fully worked on the iphone but, as others have found, it does not work on the iPad. I really hope that Apple is looking into this and will get a fix out asap!

Thhanks for all the great posts.

MacOS: High Sierra 10.13.1

iPhone 6+ iOS: 11.2

Itunes: 12.7.2.5.8

Sync type: Selected Photos albums in iTunes via USB to iPhone

STILL 😠 no photos being synced to iOS Photos albums on iPhone 6+. Only empty albums that were once populated with thousands of photos.

Prior to the iOS 11 "upgrade" I had about 21,000 photos on my iPhone in albums.

So iOS 11.2 has NOT fixed this problem.

I know this not works all the time.

Terrible bug and it last for months. Difficult to imagine that you can't transfer pictures from a Mac to a iPad. When you tell the people they can't believe it.

I spent hours and hours with Apple support on the phone. They called me back many times. They are very kind but no result till now. Here at the company in Brussels we need our iPad to work properly. This is a disaster not being able to show pictures to our customers.

Well a new iOS for Mac now 10.13.2. New iTunes now 12.7.2.58

Looking forward to something good out of this.

Apple you have NOT fixed the photos sync problem. My iPad Air still cannot sync via iTunes over USB connection.

Before the update to Mac iOS I got 200 or so pics at a time to sync before it crashed. Now it does not sync any!

Obviously users of Mac photos who want to sync iPad with Mac photos are not a priority in your engineers minds.

When oh when are you going to fix this debacle?

Totally disenchanted with Apple and am sure Steve Jobs would be sacking you guys who cannot fixwhat you ruined.

If I could not get things right when I was working, I would not have a job. The only thing I would see would be the door!

The "I have this question too" count is up to around 800. Many of us found a work around. However many have not. Yesterday I was in a medical office and everyone in staff was carrying around iPads.

Seriously Apple? This lack of concern will hit your share price. You are already a one product company, valued because of the ecosystem of inter-operability with other devices and with commerce. If that erodes, you become a commodity company, competing on price and your share value goes to around 25% of what it is today.

If that matters.

Well yet another upgrade to iOS...11.2.1

Got a little excited so upgraded and then tried yet another iTunes sync via USB to my iPad Air.

Wow.... it went like the clappers to about 500 pics to go then came to a screaming halt... stopped and the usual device error resulted.

Total disappointment!

This time 600 pics were added to my albums on iPad. Still another 4000 odd to go at this rate it will be new year before I get my photos synced

In the meantime, I am working to upload my photos to Goggle.

You have really lost the plot Apple and I for one am totally disgusted with the way you treat your users. Why wasn’t this fixed in September when it happened?

Instead you keep producing patches that don’t work to fix a system that now seems to be riddled with somany different bugs.

Bill Gates will be laughing and Jobs and Wozniak cringing!

That’s good to know.

Spent an hour on the phone again over this issue collecting more logs generated during the sync process. The agent was logged onto my computer so he could see again first hand how the sync self cancels and how the sync needs to be restarted to load the next “batch.”

Same here. I had about three calls where they were collecting logs during the sync process. The agent witnessed the canceling syncs and the internal error messages. Still waiting. I don't blame the agent. He is just collecting the info for the developers. But you would think something so common and happens so regularly could be fixed quickly.

I’ve had similar experiences. I have done videos showing the process and how it terminates. The person I spoke with said the engineers checked out the videos. I made sure to keep them less than a minute or so each with the various failure modes we’ve seen. I’ve been assured repeatedly that they are aware of the problem and are working it. Hopefully true.

To me it seems that there may be multiple issues in both iTunes and iOS that are causing the issues so it may be a complex problem to debug.

It just doesn't add up. Why are they still collecting logs from folks? They contacted me back on Oct 2 which is almost 11 weeks ago and collected data logs from me. Apple software engineers should have had NO problem recreating this failure in their software labs, and they most surely have every hardware configuration of Mac and iPad for testing a fix.

So what is going on? What if they are developing something different? Apple has already told us that iTunes will be music centric - they've already deleted iOS app management. What if Apple is planning to remove photo sync functionality from iTunes and make it a stand alone app or incorporate it into the Mac Photos app? What if that means they want to make it more powerful and add more organizational tools to it? Does that mean that they need to look at how we the enthusiast photographers have organized our libraries? Remember, the sync process starts by scanning the photo library and maybe those log files contain all the architectural info - folders, albums, tags, number of pictures, etc., that they could study and evaluate to make sure a new tool set would be comprehensive. I for one would like to see nested folder capability. Complicating it is how do we deal with the mess of both "Events" and "albums" since "Events" creation was dropped in the new Photos app.

Taking this a step further, Mac Photos already has functionality for you to create shared albums that flow to all your devices via the cloud but you can't currently organize them. What if they are planning to enhance shared album capability with a new set of organizational tools? Which leads to the question of... Why would you need both "shared albums" and "sync'd albums" functionality? One capability should suffice with the right set of organizational tools. I'm not a fan of iCloud sync as if puts too much reliance on the cloud and I much prefer local sync (USB/wifi) under my control.

All I know is that this loss of iPad photo sync functionality has gone on waaaay too long.

Please, Apple, do something!

Ranger111 ..you may well be right in thinking there is a reason why Apple have not fixed this issue.

i have wondered now for some time if there is a hidden agenda.

From all reports they must have loads of logs to see what is happening, and from this, ideas of how people are using the sync process.

if they do make changes, I hope they are not heading in the direction of using iCloud to sync...and I hope they allow the use of Albums for organising photos...events, places, things etc. is not preferable to user determined (and named) Albums in my mind.

I am really tired of waiting for a solution and feeling totally disenchanted with Apple and its engineers.

Ang