Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11

The ongoing problem continues with iOS 11.3 on phone and ipad...update of Mac OS and iTunes plus a call from my Apple consultant who has been on my case for several months now....being told Continually the engineers are working on it...nothing resolved as yet. Much to my disatisfaction, I have to use icloud as the only way to sync my photos on all my devices...it is costly, slow and not what I want to do...but it works.

I am totally disillusioned with Apple and feeling that this issue will never be resolved...Apple is concentrating more on new mickey mouse updates and not fixing the sync via itunes issue . It is now April and this issue first started in September 2017....get some decent engineers to fix it...when I need an upgrade to hardware, Apple will be my last consideration after the poor service since I went to iMac.

i just got a REAL call back from my rep, telling me that he moved to another dept, and someone else is going to take over. He assured me that all my info is passed to the new rep and you wont have to start from the beginning. little did i know that wasnt the case.
the new rep wanted to go over the whole process again, screen-sharing, log sharing and simple things like if my soft was up to date or not. This made me very frustrated which i made known! the rep then told me that there was an internal miscommunication and that some of the info i sent was looked at but never got any feedback, and they failed to followup on it, so it was forgotten about. I even told them that this seems like a stalling of time.

anyways it seems like apple is loosing the level of tech&customer support which is turning into a general major issue!

Paul, the "People" and "Places" folder contents require a lot more on-device processing, but they should have populated themselves after several weeks. Have all of the uploaded photos been downloaded?

You are correct that those folders do not display on iCloud.com, but that does not keep them from being synced among my various Macs and devices.

Well it looks like you were correct. Though the people albums appeared to be empty, I clicked on it today and it populated! Interestingly there is another folder titled "People from my Mac" which remains empty showing "0 from my Mac" though it lists all the people. Clicking on a name I see "Syncing..." Places is now populated too. There are other blanks "from my Mac" but I see "Syncing" at the bottom. I am a little less furious at Apple. I still want to synchronize from my Mac and not use iCloud so I can be more specific on what I put on what device, and I do not need to wait for slides to download -- or cannot download because I am not in a place with WiFi.

Sorry to all as this is a bit off topic.

Paul

I've been following this thread for a few months now. I've tried every suggestion mentioned all to no avail. This is now beyond frustrating as one of the reasons why I bought a 128g iPad is so I could put my 20K plus pictures on it. I did notice something interesting this morning when I tried again to sync my photos. The transfer starts as it always had in the past, i.e. very quickly, but then quickly starts to bog down, and then I get the dreaded "internal device error" message. I really was hoping this latest release would resolve this, but Apple seems more concerned with adding emoji's and not addressing a serious flaw in the new ios. Their products used to "just work", not so much now. I'm sorry I couldn't add anything, really just trying to keep this thread going, maybe someone at Apple will see this is up to 40+ pages now???

I have not attempted to sync since I updated to iTunes 12.7.4. Honestly, I’ve become afraid to update ios, iTunes, or anything from Apple. In addition, syncing has become a nightmare. I’m so disappointed with Apple and their customer service.

This problem has been going on for so long, with zero response from Apple, that I'm now thinking it's by design. Apple is forcing us to add photos to our devices via iCloud, and for some of us with large photo collections (I have 24k) I'm forced to pay $3.00/month for iCloud storage just to put my photos on MY own device. I'm very disillusioned with Apple at this point. Their software and products used to "just work", now it's endless updates to address bugs. They seem more concerned with new emoji's, than making features already present and hyped, work.

Thanks for your persistence and everyone's help on this issue. I've been managing my sync'ing with my own workaround. This news is encouraging. I hope that the "fix" makes it out in the general release version of this update. Fingers crossed.

Matti,

My observations and what I’ve read elsewhere is that the voodoo of switching iCloud Photo Library on/off is to clear the slate internal to the iPad. This is much quicker and simpler than setting up the iPad as new.

Pacolaf,

I have not updated to iOS 11.4 beta 2, but the last time that I attempted to sync with the latest updated iTunes, my sync was hung up for over an hour on reading photos. Did you have this issue? And, did you have to do anything special before you synced your photos?

Hi folks,

Feeling brave and optimistic, I tried doing the same. For the first time, I signed up iOS Beta, got the 11.4 beta into the iPad Air 2 without problems. I did the iCloud photo library toggle ON thing, made sure all the folders are completely gone from the iPad Air2, and turned it off right after.

Now comes the big moment, I tried USB syncing most of my photo albums/folders from my Windows 10 (Fall Creators Update) PC ... I selected only certain albums (not every album), 6357 photos total.

It went through steps 1 thru 4 (of 6) without hiccups. But step 5 (Reading photos from "XXXXX") note: the folder containing all the subfolders each one being one of the albums, this one is taking a very long time (just as iOS 11.3.4).

And that is when it stays for....... 30 minutes and counting.

No photo albums on the iPad Air 2 yet. And because I've deleted all of them with the iCloud photo library ON/OFF thing, there's nothing (except the originals on the PC). :-(

Well, not a full success... I have 15796 photos in my iMac and after the sync only 14159 were in my iPad. The rest of the photos didn't sync after repeating the process. I'm going delete all the photos and try it again. The good news are that no sync errors happened, and the 14159 photos synced in one step.

With the last attempt not being successful. I went troubleshooting:

1. I created a brand new main folder on my PC, which is to house all the subfolders/albums to be synced.

2. I made a copy of ONE of the subfolders/albums from the original main folder into this new folder, and it contains only 29 photos.

3. I went into iTunes and changed the photo synch folder to this new one, and viola, all 29 photos made it!

4. But when I tried adding more folders into the sync process, the process hung again on step 4 of 6.

5. The only difference between the successful sync attempt and the one right after that's unsuccessful... was the presence of the "iPod Photo Cache" folder within the main folder. Namely, it wasn't there during the first attempt, and had to be created by the sync process.

6. So I removed the "iPod Photo Cache" folder, and attempted to sync a different folder, this one containing 76 photos, and it worked again.

==> So my initial conclusion is that there is something in the "iPod Photo Cache" folder that the sync process had trouble dealing with.

....continued from the previous post:

10. I deleted the "iPod Photo Cache" folder that was created in step 9 (when 2348 photos were successfully synced).

11. I copied an addition 35 albums into the new sync folder, so now there are a total 5968 photos in 48 folders.

12. A brand new sync, and after a very very long sync, all 5968 photos made it into the iPad !!

BUT there is a new wrinkle. The 48 albums did not appear in Photos. When I toggle the view from Albums to Photos to Memories (bottom bar), those photos appear in Photos and Memories. I also used another iOS app called "EXIF Pro", which is basically showing "Albums" with photos, when clicked, being displayed in a small window with EXIF information. The Albums appear in EXIF Pro without problems.

Doctorcube, would you please share some technical details like....is it a Mac or a PC? And did you use iCloud or USB to sync, or just toggled the iCloud sync on/off as some of us did, and ever touched the iPad photo cache folder?