iTunes displays wrong iPhoto album data for sync to iOS despite deleting iPod Photo Caches

Some images to help clarify, maybe:

Here is the library with some album counts

and here is what iTunes is showing for some selected album counts:

And now that I look at it more closely, the album listing is not correcntly sorted as well as having the wrong album photo counts.

I started to get bolder, and deleted a LOT of stuff from the pkg and restarted iPhoto, to see if any of that would work, after deleting one thing here and one thing there didn't do it. Going from this:

and after restart & some rebuilding of thumbnails etc, to this:

iTunes is still offering to sync only 7440 images from this 14,943 image library. It's close but not quite as though it was showing only offering ever other image--most of the 'missing' images are from more recent dates. One album of images from 2013-2015, which includes >3,000 images, only transfers one to the phone, a single Nikon raw file (.NEF format). Only 18 of >2,000 in 2016-18 are transfered, and these include .jpg phone images; NEF files; and the more usual cropped, processed, edited jpgs of various sizes, files from the Nikon as well as my phone. So it's not a case of only NEFs or only iPhone IMGs or other untouched-by-photoshop files being 'seen' by iTunes.

léonie wrote:

I have deleted the iPod Photo Cache from the iTunes library package;

Do you mean you deleted the photo cache folder from the iPhoto Library Package as described here?

About Photo Cache folders - Apple Support

Yes, those are the caches I've deleted.

léonie wrote:

Do you have more than one iPhoto Library? iTunes may be syncing with the wrong iPhoto Library.

Yes, I have about two dozen working libraries on this mac, and dozens or hundreds more on backup drives (that are currently attached or synced here, just connected from time to time to refresh & retire current libraries to backup status).

The library I'm using for sync is called Desktop Wallpaper and I make sure that it is the current library before opening iTunes to be sure it is used for sync. This is always the procedure I use to make sure it uses the right library. In fact, to clear all the wrongly synced albums/photos out, I always sync several times to a 3-photo test library to make sure the phone is not hanging onto old photos and trying to restore them instead of going with the original library but totally fresh.

The library as I see it in Tunes has the correct album listing re: titles, but not the correct photos per album.

Another thing I've ruled out is a lost image; many past sync issues were traceable a file visible in Thumbnail only but where the original was misplaced, and selecting all 14,000+ images for a slideshow or to export would trigger dialog boxes about how various images could not be found. This time, that is not happening.

Additional troubleshooting steps that have not helped:

•restoring a version of the library dating back to a year ago, when sync issues were perfectly fine

•creating a new, empty iTunes library & trying sync from there (showed same photo numbers available)

•creating a test user account (could not get permissions to properly let us access the iPhoto library that belongs to MyUserID

•switching to different iPhoto libraries on this same computer (all my libraries, I have about 2 dozen on this machine)--similar errors but some with differing proportions of images missing from those recognized/sync-available via iTunes

Photos missing from iTunes version of the albums are mostly but not exclusively created after 2012; but my usual photo processing workflow has been the same since 2007 (95% of images on Nikon camera, photoshopped from .NEF files to .jpgs customized to size of this laptop screen in Photoshop, only then are images imported into the relevant iPhoto library for use in this screensaver/desktop/sync library).

This library is NOT synced to any cloud services (e.g., these are not images also stored and linked to Flickr, SmugMug, etc although I do put images there, they are other versions of the images uploaded from other libraries).

All syncs are hardwired, no iCloud or wi-fi sync used (or permissible due to security concerns for work)

Problem predates update from El Capitan to High Sierra (problem noticed in June, possibly in April as well but cannot recall for sure; El Cap to High Sierra update done end July or early August

Another step that may clarify further:

I connected the phone to a laptop that was set up as a carbon copy clone of the primary computer a year ago, and that only shows half of the images in iPhoto as available to sync. Perhaps iOS is the culprit, because various combinations of one phone and two laptops, updated or reloaded Mac OS, multiple iPhoto libraries and versions of the same library, and multiple iTunes libraries (primary plus a test library created in the same user directory) are giving similar errors?

More troubleshooting because I can't help myself:

Copied library, opened with Photos, after I told it to use this library as 'system library', iTunes sync via Photos of the same library showed all 14,000+ images available for Sync. But: using Photos on this library is truly surreal. I can scroll through the whole album and there are huge patches of blank space with an image surrounded by blank space....is Photos trying to 'display' every image that was once part of the library and has since been deleted?

Those blank spaces, BTW, are the most common in the earlier images, NOT the newer images that are least likely to show as available to be copied when I tell iTunes to go through iPhoto.

....But, interestingly, Photos will only sync the photos to the phone that are visible in the library. So an album of 71 images (which iPhoto will happily show all 71 as a slideshow), of which only one image shows in album view in Photos, only syncs one image to the phone. So Photos offers all but gives little.

Rebuilding the library via iPhoto Library Manager (which essentially copies all content to a new library, consolidating both referenced and managed images all to a single managed library structure) resulted in iTunes offering a 14,000+ images to sync.....but only 4900 arrived on the phone, split seemingly randomly between older and newer, referenced and managed photos--the both older and newer smart albums sorted by date are lacking lots of images. And the album sort was comprehensively messed up.

So the 3rd party software & change from mixed reference (most) and managed (few) to all managed did not help.

iPad3, which is on latest version of iOS available to it, 9.3.5, doesn't get offered any more images to sync than the iPhone. Will not run the actual sync to test on this one because it still has >14,000 images on it, from a sync as recently as the beginning of June 2018, with properly assigned and ordered albums.

Finally from the Apple Engineers, after we captured a sync session log and returned it to Apple: they are aware of the problem, and reported that it will be fixed in a software update.

That suggests to me that the problem must be in the current version of iTunes, because iPhoto won't be updated anymore....and it was happening with two different OS X versions (predated update from El Cap to High Sierra), two iOS devices on two versions of iOS (both updated as much as possible), so maybe it was an iTunes update that messed me up?

And here you can see there is no cache left in the library

Should have added--everything as up to date as I can make it on these devices:

iPhoto 9.6.1

iTunes 12.8.0

Mac OS 10.13.6

iPhone 5S with iOS 11.4.1

And it's also not that all images 'past' a certain image are not transferring, as I might expect if it was one corrupted image that needed to be replaced from backup.