Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11

I have an iPad Pro running iOS 11.2.5 and I want to sync all of my photos that are located on my MacBook Air running MacOS 10.13.3

The sync gets so far - about 400 photos out of 7,000 or so - and then cancels the sync. I get the spinning coloured disc for a while and then nothing.....

I have tried deleting the iPod Photo Cache and I've even done a complete Restore of the iPad - nothing worked.

I have same problem on my iPhone 6 as well.......

I just bought a new iPad Pro 12.9 and set it up as a "new iPad" (as opposed to restoring from an iTunes backup). I chose to sync ALL photos via iTunes sync and indeed, it DID sync all my photos and albums BUT it also makes "albums" out of every single date that I added photos to the Photos program on my Mac so I have hundreds of albums on my iPad with dates as the album name in addition to my "named" albums. On my old iPad Air, I would elect to sync selected albums only and then uncheck ALL the "albums" that were just dates in iTunes before syncing. It worked before things went awry with iOS 11. I didn't get any errors on the first sync of the new iPad but did get the usual "Attempting to copy to disk failed - unknown error -54" on the 2nd sync.

Filled out the form.

After signing in and out of MacBook, iPad, iPhone. MacBook and iPad synced ok. But iPhone just sits there.

Also, would like to see something saying “checking against iCloud” instead of uploading.

Thanks Tezlaw. In my case, the iTunes (W10) to iPhone 8 Plus Photos sync is working fine, maintaining all my albums, whether native to iOS 11 and earlier, or created in Windows. It's the iPad Air 2 that has the sync issue. I did back it up, and then set-up the iPad as new, including re-loading iOS 11. However, I then did a restore from the back-up, and the iTunes photo sync again failed. If you didn't use a back-up, the problem could be corrupted memory as you suggested, or maybe there's a very common app out there causing the issue. I remember a similar instance a year ago where a specific travel app was causing a different conflict.

Because of this problem and Apple’s implied attitude I will take a financial position that bets that Apple stock goes down. Their future is their pile of cash. They have no future otherwise. They released an iHome speaker after Christmas, that can’t compete with Alexa. No innovation since the iPad. Now, poor attitude towards customers.

Agreed!

It wonder if photography buff stockholders could have an impact.

I no longer recommend Mac. And honestly feel burned that I spent the $ on hardware to carry these photos - something I can no longer do.

On the surface, their products are "cool" and may work for the younger generation that is cloud based, but for me, they are beginning to fail miserably. Look at the MacPro, introduced in 2013 and I believe it has not been updated since. Base model is still $3K. Give me a break!

Just tried to sync my iPad mini after doing software update to iOS 9.3.5 model MD529LL/A and was unsuccessful to get any new photos in library. My computer is a brand new iMAC Pro 2017 3 GHz Intel Xeon W / 64 GB 2666 MHz DDR4 / Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB. So much money for a machine and can't do what I need the most. It did a back up of the iPad mini, but then no new photos in Albums I have updated on my computer. Another wasted effort with Apple at fault. I can say that this type of problem first occurred for me on iPhone 6 back in Nov 2017 - 113 days later and nothing from Apple to solve this. almost 4,000 comments on said topic just in this thread. unsure how many others have same problem but this really bites! 😠

How many times must we do this???

This issue has now been going for 6 Months with the same request for error logs and promises of a fix.

Absolutely NO sign of a fix in spite of promises from consultants that the engineers are working on it.

Pretty poor customer support and I for one have almost given up hope.

My belief is Apple want us to go the iCloud route (which works!) and have no intention of fixing the problem

Angry over the whole issue

Ang

It depends what you mean, when you say iCloud works! My understanding is that you get all your photos on your iPad, but at low resolution only, as thumbnail previews, then full resolution copies are downloaded from iCloud when you want to view them. (Correct me if I‘m wrong). Totally useless if, like me, you’ve got 25,000+ pics and may well want to view them when there is no internet connection, and even when there is a connection, each image will take far longer to download than being able to flick through them when they’re already on your iPad locally. Disastrous if you’re trying to show someone several hundred images!! This whole issue is getting to be a farce, and another example of Apple deciding how we are going to use our equipment, rather than listening to us saying what we want.

I had optimize storage turned on and ran into a problem @ walgreens with their app to pick photos. The cloud photos would hang and crash the app. I didn’t figure this out til later. So even tho I had enough space for all the photos, optimize storage still kept some in the cloud.

That’s when I decided it was time to turn off optimize storage...and now I regret getting a 128GB MacBook Pro last year. 😟

I’ll definitely keep it on tho because I’ve started using iMovie for 4K home videos. Some of them can be 3-5 GB each and that might not work well for working with them.

Also, if I record a large 4K video on the phone, then it uploads to the cloud...does it then pass the file to my ipad and macbook over WiFi or does it pull it down from my internet connection after the phone’s finished putting it up in the cloud?

Jodiuh wrote:

Also, if I record a large 4K video on the phone, then it uploads to the cloud...does it then pass the file to my ipad and macbook over WiFi or does it pull it down from my internet connection after the phone’s finished putting it up in the cloud?

The latter. iCloud Photo Library is a hub-and-spoke system; everything runs to and from the cloud servers. (Just describing how it seems to work, not trying to justify it.)

what I’m not clear about is, if you use iCloud and select ‘Download and keep Originals’, how much space do you use on your iPad? If you sync via iTunes, it optimises your images, i.e. it compresses them to give best quality for the screen size available, without storing too high a resolution for the screen size available (at least, I assume that’s what it’s doing!). Whatever, it means the pic library ends up using a fraction of the memory on the iPad, compared to the actual file sizes on my PC. Does the iCloud route just download full resolution files, same as on the PC, in which case there’s no way my photo library would fit on the iPad, or does it ‘optimise’ them, in the same way that iTunes sync does? If it’s the former, then I’m stuck with ot being able to get my pics on the iPad; if it’s the latter, then the iCloud route might possibly work.

I've always worked under the assumption that "Download...Originals" meant full-resolution originals, even on iOS devices. That way, you get to see maximum resolution, even when zoomed in further than full screen. You also get to send full-resolution pictures to other people and print at the maximum resolution of your output device.

Have same problem also. I already have the latest iTunes (12.7.3) and the latest iOS (11.2.6) in both my phones but can't sync only the photo folder. It always cancelling sync at the and of process. Contacts and songs are okay. But I can't update my photo from my computer to my phones.

Uninstall and install iTunes doesn't work at all

So I did reset all content and settings, and it works again!!!!! .......... but only for few times sync process!!! After that, my phone can't sync the photos again.

If I should reset my iphone everytime i want to update my photo, it will be waste my time.

So, what should I do????

Isn't 25-30 syncs reasonable amount of time for you to spend? Hahahahaha I think I gave up syncing after attempt 20, so you are really persistent! I am trying today again after some updates but keeping expectations real low. Still using LightRoom and actually liking the resulting capabilities to edit which are much more sophisticated that Apple's baseline products. Good luck folks - I'm planning a call tomorrow with Engineers expecting the trouble shooting process to suck up more of my time without resolve...