Albums are synced only partly from my Mac to my iPhone

Question

Albums are synced only partly from my Mac to my iPhone

I store all photos in the Photos app on my Mac.

As my library is > 600 GB I would need a 2 TB storage plan which is 120 € per year (9,99 € a month) to store the whole library on iCloud. This is too expensive. Therefore I do not use iCloud for storing my Photos library.

I sync only specific albums via cable to my iPhone and iPad. This has been working fine for many years (and it still does on my iPad).

On my iPhone I've seen the following behaviour since iOS 18.5 (or maybe its predecessor):

In the Finder I select my iPhone on the sidebar. Then on the Photos tab I select new albums and click Apply.

After syncing I see that the new albums were only partly available on the iPhone.

In my case the numbers look like this:

12 of 109

1 of 6

8 of 26

17 of 27

2 of 5

The remaining photos of these albums were not synced to my iPhone.

This is repeatable. I have tried this several times.

Does anybody have any idea why this happens?

iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 18

Posted on Jun 27, 2025 7:35 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 27, 2025 8:04 AM in response to thomas.gruenler

thomas.gruenler wrote: …This has been working fine for many years

First, a snarky comment: I used a dial telephone for many years and it worked just fine. It would probably still work, but I'd find it very limiting these days.

Now, here's what I and many of us do: We keep multiple Photos Libraries. The one that is connected to iCloud (and requiring iCloud storage) is my Favorites Library-- it has only the pictures that I want to see and share using my iPad or iPhone. Since it's just the Favorites, it's way smaller, and so I only need 200 GB of iCloud Storage. And when I show them to people, I don't have to scan through a bunch of irrelevant pictures.

All the rest of the not-so-favorite pictures, as well as the Favorites, are kept in another "Archive" Library not connected to iCloud. (Actually, I have several archive libraries for separate purposes.) Pictures taken on my Nikon, for instance, go to the Nikon Library where I edit them and pick out the Favorites. Then I import the Favorites to the Favorites Library connected to iCloud. Pictures I take on my iPhone all go straight to Favorites, but I import them to my iPictures Library (really) and delete the useless ones from Favorites.

So I get to use the sleek, dependable, automatic, modern system of iCloud synchronization without taking up so much iCloud storage.

What do you think?

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Answer 2

Jun 27, 2025 9:08 AM in response to Richard.Taylor

Thank you very much for your comment, Richard, - also the snarky part. ;-)

Your proposal might be an option if I cannot find another solution.

I try to keep the effort as low as possible.

So in a first step I would like to understand why a procedure that has worked for many years does not work any longer.

I thought that the sync procedure might have changed in some way that leads to this issue.

So. hopefully somebody of this community has an idea of what's going on and tell me how to solve this.

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Answer 3

Jun 27, 2025 9:59 AM in response to thomas.gruenler

thomas.gruenler wrote: : would like to understand why a procedure that has worked for many years does not work any longer.

I think that you will find that, as time goes on, Apple will be less and less interested in USB cable transfers-- that was the part about the telephone system no longer supporting dial phones. Apple has certainly not said this, but I don't think hard wire transfers are getting a lot of their attention. Many of the difficulties we see with transfers involve cables. Of course, I really have no idea.

Have you tried swapping cables? USBc is notorious for having different quality cables. Many cables work fine for power, but they don't transfer data well.

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