Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11

It will help to raise Apple's attention level with this problem if everyone who has used this thread could report the problem to: Photos for iOS - Feedback - Apple

The more people that do this, the more likely it will be fixed!

I tried to reset my iPad Pro 9.7" to factory defaults. I even chose NOT to restore from the possibly corrupted backup. So I had a complete plain vanilla iOS system.

Then I created a brand-new plain vanilla Photos album and added 100 images at a time to it, making a sync from iTunes to the iPad after each import (after Activity Monitor CPU usage was idling indicating Photos.app was done with adding Faces and other housekeeping).

But the old sync problems persisted even after this: missing photos, iPad's Photos staying in "Syncing...." phase, unexpected sync errors.

I bought the largest 256 GB iPad so I could add (almost) all my photos and videos to it. My children loved it. But since last autumn I have been unable to use that storage for Photos because sync failures started when iOS 11 was launched. Now my children repeatedly wonder where all the family photos from the iPad have gone. I tell them that it will be fixed soon but I am beginning to lose my faith.

EVERYBODY PLEASE REPORT THE PROBLEM TO APPLE

It will help to raise Apple's attention level to this problem if everyone will report the problem to:

Photos for iOS - Feedback - Apple

The more people that do this, the more likely it will be fixed!

Just a thought for all those feeling left out and forgotten by Apple. Try Adobe Lightroom! I'm using their cloud shared Collections and I think it's a nice way to share images too. I needed a work around and my IT guy suggested this for the time being but in reality., who needs the Apple middleman with all the hiccups from iTunes over the years and now with no ability to fix it... 😕

KEEP REPORTING THESE PROBLEMS TO APPLE on both the Photos and iTunes feedback pages

The more times we do this, the more it will help to raise Apple's awareness of the extent of this problem and how strongly people feel about it.

Please spend a few minutes to report the problem on the feedback pages for both applications:

Photos for iOS - Feedback - Apple

and

Feedback - iTunes - Apple

I have had the same issue with IOS 11 and a 256gb iPad Pro 9.7. It would only ever sync 300 or so photos then either freeze or cancel sync or report an internal error. I have 35000 photos which all sync'ed ok under IOS 10 but were scrambled after upgrading to IOS 11. I have been gradually syncing them all back to the iPad but at 300 a time it was taking forever - particularly as the sync process involved a backup of the iPad each time.

I then found a way of temporarily disabling the backup and was surprised to find that the remaining 10000 or so photos synced in one or two attempts. Once completed the backup can be re-enabled. The off switch is:

(Paste this and hit return in your Terminal.app)

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

The on switch is:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

Worth a try anyway. It is worthwhile to start with a clean slate ie shut down iTunes then do a two button reset on the iPad and connect to computer with a cable.

Not sure why Apple is not addressing this issue Publicly, as many are having this same issue. Yesterday I was on the phone with a higher level tech from Apple. He informed me that this issue is a code issue to be dealt with soon with an update. No answer on the ETA of repairs tho. He couldn't give me an answer, but just said their engineers are working on a code fix. This problem is only affecting photos. Just irritating that this issue is ongoing without a resolution.

I have previously posted about continuing difficulties syncing between my iMac based Photos account and two devices, an iPhone 6S and an iPad Air2 (3 Jan, 6 Dec, 12 Oct, 5 Oct, 1 Oct). Since my last post I have moved on to IOS 11.2.6 for both devices; the same problem continued, with the iPhone receiving all photos and the iPad not updating. Then at the beginning of March the iPad started syncing correctly and receiving a full set of photos. Now both devices are syncing photos correctly. I’ve held off posting this in case this was just a fluke, but the photo sync continues to work correctly. I haven’t made any changes to the way the devices are connected (direct USB cable from iMac to device with wireless sync and iCloud Photo sync turned off), or to the iOS device settings. I can only guess that an update to a third party app that uses Photos has unblocked a sync setting.

I am using an iMac with a Fusion drive (running MacOS 10.12.6 (no 10.13/High Sierra installation, because of reported incompatibility between 10.13 file management and Fusion drives - another solution awaited for that) and IOS devices running IOS 11.2.6 (iPhone 6S and iPad Air2). iCloud photo sync is not in use. This is a USB cable connection. iTunes is now running on 12.7.4.76 (installed 30 March, and after the syncing started working correctly again).

I don’t plan to install iOS 11.3. Other posts list the string of other difficulties with that, and I was caught out by iOS 11.2.1 (3 Jan post), which stopped iPad photos syncing. Once bitten twice shy.

Audiomixer,

Well the anticipation was too much. I went ahead and downloaded the beta profile and installed iOS 11.4 beta 2 onto my iPad air. The lure of a successful photo sync was too much for me to deny. I can report that YES iTunes photo sync from my Mac to my iPad air does in fact work. Success! It appears that Apple has finally fixed it. But, the key (as you said above) is that you first have to turn on iCloud photo library to delete all your iPad photos, ghost folders, and the residual "syncing...." message at the bottom of the albums window view. After iCloud photo library completes the turn on process, wait a moment and turn it back off. Back over on iTunes, I used "selected albums" for my sync and it works. Subsequent syncs adding folders worked as well. No iPad internal fail message, no partial transfers - it all worked. It only took 7 months for Apple to get here, but I can finally say that I am one happy camper!

For me, simply selecting select albums>all photos and albums was enough to get the changes I made to my Mac photos library synced to my iPad accurately. I verified the albums and picture counts in each. Did this with two iPads and two different computers and libraries. Feeling brave, the Only reason I did the turn on icloud photo sync and let it clear everything out and turn it off again was to test whether it would cancel sync or give that internal device error while syncing. Was glad that I was able to sync in one attempt fully and accurately. Haven’t tried this with iphoto nor aperture.

As far as signing up for beta. Start here. Apple Beta Software Program

Today, May 30, 2018 I finally could sync my photos from my iMac to my iPad Pro 9,7". It took Apple more than 8 months to solve this problem. Bad. Very bad.

This is what I did.

I first updated iTunes on my iMac to the latest version (12.7.5). Then I updated my iPad to iOS 11.4. That all went smoothly. Then on my iMac I deleted the iPod Photo Cash from the Photos Library (Show Packages), because others had advised to do that first. I already had deleted all my photos on my iPad - Photos was completely empty.

Then I opened an older version of iTunes (12.7.3) with the libraries that belonged to that version (I had compressed versions of all of them on my iMac). I connected my iPad, selected it, and in the left pane selected Photos. As the source for the sync I selected Photos and then choose All Photos + Albums. Hit Apply and crossed my fingers. I had 3444 photos to sync - it took less than 20 minutes to sync. Great.

I checked the Photos app on my iPad - 3418 photos were copied - so 26 photos were missing. It took some time to find out which photos were missing. It were all very old photos, but for now I can not find the reason why they did not sync. No big problem. More important - all my albums were there and in good shape. I checked them all, and all were correct, except for that few missing photos.

Finally!

I didn't dare to try to sync with the very new version of iTunes (12.7.5). Did anybody try do do that?

Syncing photo libraries from a PC to iOS 11.4 looks promising. NOW ALL my 32000 images synced without errors to the iPad from the photo library via iTunes 12.7.4 (Mac mini (Late 2009), OS X 10.11.6).

NO missing photos, iPad's Photos staying in "Syncing...." phase, unexpected sync errors etc that have plagued Photos.app 1.5 and iPhoto.app 9.6.1 since the introduction of iOS 11 in September 2017.

I updated iPad Pro 9.7" to iOS 11.4, as a recommended voodoo I turned iPad iCloud Photo Library ON/OFF to zap iPad Photo library, and rebooted the iPad. I then started re-filling the iPad from iPhoto.app 9.6.1 library events (each event is about 4.7 GB, containing 1000-2000-6000 .jpg images and a few .tif and .png. As a start, I also synced a few 4.7 GB movie events containing <100 files, but there are still 200 GB worth of movie events to be synced). I synced each of those 20 events one-by-one and verified the image count (not all movies were synced because their codec is incompatible with the iPad).

ALL 32000 images transferred without errors. This has not happened in previous iOS 11 versions. This time I deliberately did not stress the system trying to sync everything at once. And I haven't yet tried to sync updated events. But maybe this bug has been FINALLY solved.

I did just try a sync too with iOS 11.4, iPad Pro 9.7 and iTunes 12.7.5.9 and it *appears* that it synced all the photos. I synced about 19,000 first in one huge batch and they synced, and now added the remainder and so far it appears to be syncing fine. So far it is at about 26,000 photos and nearly finished. As a plus, they seem to be in the albums correctly. I had it down to about 1200 photos so my wife could see current ones since that is the iPad she uses when first I tried syncing this morning and it went from ~1,200 to 19,000 without a hitch.

One thing to note, I tried syncing first WITHOUT doing any zapping, deleting or anything else. I just plugged it in, selected the albums I wanted to add, and let it sync. It synced quite quickly also. This is the first time since last Fall that sync has worked properly on the iPad Pro 9.7. I don't want to count my chickens yet until it continues to work properly for a few weeks or months, but this is definitely encouraging. (I know my wife will be happy to have the photos there because she'd been super frustrated that she didn't have photos on her iPad to imessage/email to friends/family.)

This is on a MacMini, 16GB, 46,581 photos in Photos, USB sync.

Fingers crossed.

My last sync seems to be absent of most of the problems in recent months.... I had nearly 6000 photos in nearly 50 albums. Added about only 3 or 4 new photos this time. I didn't turn on/off the iCloud photo sync setting, didn't clear the cache, just hit sync. After the first few steps related to backing up and syncing music, it came to the photos part, it says copying 1283 photos. I let it finish (Took about 5 minutes) Then the whole process is done. I waited another 5 minutes (without touching anything), then clicked to check my photo albums. Everything's there. The key point seems to be .... I need to let the iPad settle down before checking.

I too have had the no photo sync with iTunes issue since October. With the latest iOS update, I believe the issue is finally fixed.

To make it work, do the following;

1-On the iOS device, turn iCloud photo sync ON.

2-Say “okay” to erasing all photos on iOS device.

3-Turn iCloud photo sync OFF.

4-Give iOS device a few hours to erase all photos.

5-Sync with iTunes and be sure “photos” sync is on and select all or selected albums. I have found that “all” will create MANY albums with dates and roll numbers so I choose only to sync my named albums.

So far, I am getting all albums selected and all photos in those albums.