iTunes stuck on "Reading photos from Pictures"

Tubulosity wrote:

What is amazing to me (this is my third comment in this thread) is that nobody from Apple is bothering to respond to the growing number of posts on this topic (now running at about 15-20 per day).

Welcome to the Apple way. This is a user to user support forum. Apple don't respond directly here, except in the shape of community specialists who will try to answer some otherwise unloved topics by pointing to support topics. Apple rarely comment publicly on bugs or feature changes. Use Feedback - iTunes - Apple to increase Apple's awareness of the issue. It will most likely be fixed in the next release.

tt2

I have tried... deleting iPod photo cache, restore, resetting phone settings, sync as new phone... I had for weeks gets stuck on reading photos , now.. it sits on reading photos for about an hour... then goes to analizing photo library... then just quits and it says the sync failed ... I’m a photographer and I use my phone/iPad for a good portion of my business and this is infuriating... I had to start paying for google drive {. Heard it’s better than iCloud} just to keep business as usual... this is ridiculous... it’s a feature that has always been a part of Apple... it’s advertised by Apple.... FIX IT!

Microsoft have given me 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage free with the family Office 365 annual subscription and I can load everything in folders there - upload to files rather than photos and they are all there then and automatically synced from the PC files - fine as long as u have a data connection when you need to look something up. I'd still prefer to have them physically on my devices though!!

Hello all.

i just spoke to a supervisor at Apple technical support, just to add my voice to this issue. While there is nothing new to report (no surprise there), he suggested that as many people as possible should call Apple to report the issue and using his words, “add logs to the fire” with their engineering people.

So, I agree. Call them and let them know. If you’ve already called, call them again. If you haven’t called, do so. I know everyone is busy and we’re all frustrated beyond measure, but if you can, please add your voice. Apple should hear from us directly. This has gone on for far too long.

This is very frustrating. My wife got a new iPad yesterday and was really looking forward to being able to look at all our photo albums on it. We left it syncing all night; and this morning, of course, it was still stuck on the penultimate sync step. So, no photo albums are on it.

To address two points that were made in this thread in the last few days:

1. Maybe this is only affecting a minority of users.

Well, yes and no. The majority of iOS users probably just use their device(s) to take pictures and organize their photos on. However, those of us who have digital photos from other sources (photos taken with an actual digital camera and old film-camera photos that have been scanned and stored on the PC) really need iTunes to deliver our carefully-curated digital albums to our iOS devices. We may be in the minority; but we are serious about our photos and should not be dismissed by Apple as not worthy of their attention. I suspect that the majority of this minority are affected by this bug -- it's not just a random thing.

2. Apple has to cope with so many variables - iOS versions, Windows versions, etc.

I don't consider this a valid excuse. Apple has total control over the hardware architecture of all Apple devices, all releases of iOS, the lightning connector, and the protocol used over the Apple-device-to-PC connection; so the only variable they don't control is the version of Windows -- just like every other writer of Windows software. Would you be OK if a $2,000 piece of CAD-CAM software stopped working after a windows update and the vendor did nothing to fix it for two months?

In summary -- the Windows iTunes sync function is a critical piece of functionality that a subset of users find very important. It is their very reasonable expectation that Apple should have fixed this bug weeks ago and that they should not be spending their time trying wrestling with complex, unsatisfactory work-arounds.

Are you sure the photos are not on the phone? Did you look in the photos tab which shows at the bottom of the screen when you open the Photos App? That shows you the amount of photos that are on the device with them stored in date order (you need to be in 'Collections' view to see that number. It may well be that the photos are there, just not stored in albums as expected???

Since updating iOS and iTunes yesterday to latest version it synced perfectly, 12,700+ photos and videos in under half an hiur all in correct folders and adding few new ones today also went quickly and smoothly

Just finished syncing and loading 38,000 photos in 68 folders perfectly after downloading newest version of iTunes.

So glad Apple finally solved the syncing issue that has been plaguing so many for so long.

Thank you again.

Worked for 3 days this week with Senior Tech advisor trying to sync my photos. No luck.

Tuesday when new updates were released I was able to sync over 38,000 photos to my iPad Pro in less than an hour. It read all 57 folders with no issues.

Suggest you try Apple tech support. They will walk you through every possible solution.

Good luck.

It doesn’t work for me either, on 12.7.4 it worked by deleting the iPod photo cache but now a new sync on 12.7.5 doesn’t work it took all night to sync but most of the albums are only half full. Is there any 3rd party photo apps out there because iTunes is useless, it was useless before 12.7.4, it was useless 5 years ago and still is completely and utterly hopeles. To say I’ve always hated iTunes is an understatement, I wish I never had to touch it. As for iCloud I don’t even want to go there, that’s rubbish too, I want my photos in their specific albums like Year 2017, Year 2018, Mexico 2018 and so on. I can’t see a fix coming either, if it’s not photos it’s an error code 54 (for 3 years on 3 different upgrades) but at least that error still let me sync my photos. I don’t get why we just can’t create our own albums in camera roll where we can move the photos on the device itself to that album then delete from camera roll but photo remains in its new album, can’t be difficult to implement surely but no it’s not happening because Apple want full control and want you to buy iCloud storage which I refuse to do because that’s useless too.

can not sync photos with ios 11.3 and itunes 12.7.4

Go to the thread Zwergenmaus has posted in this thread and there is advice on how to go back to the previous iTunes.

Hi Dorable Dese - try installing the iOS 11.4 update just out and do a sync...…. might just save you a trip to Brent Cross on Thursday :-)

Itunes is stuck syncing on step of 5 of 6 when syncing my iPhone X running iOS 11.3 on Windows 10 64-bit. Noticed also that under device manager iPhone is using MTP USB driver from Microsoft and when I point to use usbaapl64.inf I receive message "the folder you specified doesn't contain a compatible software driver for your device." I can right click on the driver and it states it installs successful with issue remaining.

Have uninstalled and re-installed with same issue. Reported the issue to Apple and fingers crossed it's resolved soon....