Connecting mac to icloud photos causes albums to disappear on all devices.

Recently I have been wanting to connect my mac to icloud photos so that I can figure out which photos are not in an album. I hate having lose photos around and want to be able to access them quickly, if they're not in an album chances are I don't even know I have these photos.

Connecting my iphone to icloud was easy and didn't give me any hassle. It duplicated a few pictures, but nothing major, and after deleting them everything was fine.

However, now whenever I try to connect my mac to icloud photos it makes loads of my pictures become uncropped and also it gets rid of all of my albums - except for the top ones you cant delete - and not only on my mac, but it gets rid of all my albums on my iphone, and on icloud.com. So every time this happens I have to go and restore my phone. This is the 4th time i've done it - trying things different each time - and still it just deletes all my albums and uncrops my photos!!!

Yes, everything is up to date.

Yes, I have tried restarting my phone and my mac.

I've also made sure that all my recently deleted pictures were deleted for good, I found that a lot of the time some of the recently deleted pictures would appear in the all photos, no longer deleted.

Even after doing all of that - and trying out different icloud settings (Keeping originals, optimizing) on both the mac and the iphone nothing works!!! If someone can please help me out with this problem that would be great! I'm giving myself a blood clot over this.