But Photos for Mac has been a total disaster. Since the introduction of Mojave it has never synced. I have had it on two different Macs and the problems have followed me from Mojave to Catalina.
Apple engineers have not been able to fix the problem.
I am at the point of switching to Google Photos. Which I really don’t want to do.
Does anyone else have syncing problems using Photos Mac with large libraries?
I will not whine only to say my personal experience with Photos has been absolutely miserable.
Does iCloud Photos sync properly to multiple iOS devices, or do you have just one?
What I’m looking for is some hint about where the corruption is. If iCloud Photos can sync between multiple iOS devices, it’s probably local to the Mac, whereas if multiple iOS devices have problems, it would suggest a centralized problem.
What happens if you create a new library in Photos on the Mac, and make that one your System Photo Library? Does it ever receive all the photos from iCloud?
Yes, the create an empty library worked to at least get the Mac in sync initially.
The library would still do its attempt to upload all 22,000 photos even ones that hadn’t been touched in years. I don’t know why Apple does it this way. To my way of thinking they. Should download the new photos first and matching on metadata, file size, and date and only when they differ upload the newer (edited or imported) photo.
I have no idea but 1,400 really old photos were loaded into my phone as recent. They obviously came from iCloud downloaded to the izohone. Now Photos Mac nags me to import what would be duplicates.
I have no idea how to fix that. This happened during an early beta for iOS 13.
Now in Catalina 6 we had a bug that it seemed to hang Photos Mac when I tried to set the empty library as the system library.
Beta 7 fixed that bug but introduced a new one. The empty photo library will not download from iCloud. Add one new photo via import will start the updating … but nothing actually happens. (one of my many persistent whines is that the update function should tell the user what it is doing. At the moment it does not. IOS version gives verbose progress reports.
Without whining it is three different engineering teams on Photos. The iOS team, the iCloud server team, and the Mac Photos team.
Knowing how Applie prioritizess the iPhone and somewhat neglects the Mac Because the iPhonr has a larger user base and generate more revenue than the desktop and laptop stuff, it would certainly stand to reason that the best engineering talent is assigned first to the iPhone, then the cloud and the most juniors new hires work on Nac OS X Photos apo.
I have no knowledge that my supposition is true but to me there is a huge difference in the performance of the iOS versions versus the Mac OD versions.
Given that you’re working with multiple betas, it’s hard to make any useful suggestions—the fact that there are betas involved trumps all other likely solutions.
I don’t quite understand why you’re saying an empty library would upload anything—it should just be downloading if there’s nothing in it. I did this a while back and it worked fine to get my library from iCloud down to the Mac, and new photos added to the Mac synced up fine after that.
Photos does often claim to be “uploading” photos when it’s just checking sync state. It’s faster than initially (when it could take weeks), but it can still take a day or two even when no data has to be moved.
The best I can suggest at this point would be to make sure you have a backup and clear both the iPhone and the Mac of all photos, then sync again from iCloud to both.
Forgive my amateur video. However, it does work. Get your photos back on your iOS device now. Super easy. Time consuming for those of us with thousands of pics… But easy. No non-apple software required. Give my video a look. It’s 4 minutes well spent.
Forgive me for opening an old conversation but I may have a more recent issue that seems to fit here:
I keep my photos library on a SSD which is attached to my MBP M1 (OS 11.1). All the photos I shot have synced to both my iPhone and my iPad and to iCloud, but the syncing to the MBP stopped a couple of days ago. I don’t have a clue about what to do next. Signing off and back on on my account did not have any effect. Any bright ideas?
No pausing, every device is busy. Funny thing is (see picture) the number of pictures that is being uploaded. Don’t know where they come from. The right number is one of these: 35893 (iPad), 35880 (iPhone), 35785 (MBP) and 35870 (iCloud).
Status as of this morning: looks like everything is in sync if you accept 35.880/35.880/35.890/35871 to be in sync. This whole issue remains a mystery to me.
