Photos App on iMac Doesn't See Photos For Import on iPhone since iOS 26

I have this same problem and I have just come off a call with Apple support. They are blaming it on my Mac software being old. I am running Ventura 13.7.8, and as such he said it isnt worth him raising this as an issue as it probably wont get fixed!!

HOWEVER, we did seem to come across a work around which has workd 100% since my call.... fingers crosed it continues to work.

I had notived that very occasionally the photos app worked and I could see the iphone pics, but 99.99999% of the time it deisplayed 'No Photos'.

While on the call with Apple support I was doing a screen share with them and I was contiunually unplugging and plugging in the phone to the iMac so they could see what was happening. And once or twice it did actually work.

we noticed that on the odd occasion when it worked, the Photos app was asking me to 'Unlock the iPhone' prior to 'Preparing to import'. On the occasions that it DIDNT work, we noticed the app just went straight to 'Preparing to Import' and then 'No Photos'.

So the work around is to ensure the iphone is LOCKED prior to plugging into the mac. Choose your iphone in the photos app device list, and then unlock the phone when it asks you to.

Be aware that if you gave 'Face ID' set on.. it is soooo easy for the phone to unlock too early in the process if you accidentally look at it :-). so ensure you dont look at it until photos app tells you to unlock.

This has worked 100% for me. I had the same problem on iPad too, and this works also.

OK, i noticed a wrinkle. After unlocking Photos app start loading my new photos from my phone, and you can observe the number going up in the upper left. When I get impatient and start scrolling down to select only the most recent images, then it seems Photos will give up part way, and only show some of my new importable photos. If instead, I am patient and wait a few seconds, the Photos app will keep counting and eventually stop when it count ALL of my new photos. Once that number stops increasing, only then can one scroll down to find all of your new photos. Weird behavior I guess because I have not deleted some photos on my phone that I don't wish to import.

Tried this, did not work. But I left my phone connected to my computer for a couple of hours. Still nothing. Sometimes says it is waiting, sometimes says "no photos found". But then I quite Photos again, started it up, and lo and behold, all the available photos showed up, just like before ios 26. No idea why, but maybe the computer needed a hour or so to 'look' at the phone???

So JRDs method worked for me, but then stopped working consistently. My best guess is I did not wait long enough before unlocking the phone. If I unlocked it quickly after Photos told me to, then sometimes it would only load a portion of the images to import. And waiting for that number to increase after unlocking did not work. I made it work once by waiting for a few minutes to unlock the phone. Monterey 12.7.1 on MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021), with iPhone 14 pro. Should I try updating to 12.7.6? Or update all the way to Tahoe?

Same problem, and your workaround doesn't seem to work for me. Number of photos already uploaded changes every time, and I can't see my new photos to transfer them to my Mac. iPhone 13 Pro Max running 26.0.1 connected to MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016) running Monterey 12.7.6

I didn't mean to update to the new iPhone OS until it went through a half-dozen rounds of patches. Just becasue of issues like this.

Yeah I noticed that sometimes the app would only show a subset of the photos for this reaason. But now that I have sync's all my pics... I am going to keep on top of it so that like you, all my new pis will be dispolayed before I get impatient. :-)

At least we now have a work around that works, if like the Apple fella says.. its doubtful we will get a fix for it

I've got the exact same issue, as you described, as well.

iPhone 16 pro / ios 26.0.1

macbook pro 15-inch, 2017 / macOS 13.7.8

any fix for this yet?

See my response on this thread for a work around which is working 100% for me. Looks like you may be falling foul of an older OSX version like me.

Hopefully this works for you too

Thank you so much. This actually works.

and wow... quite a bs excuse from apple support. probably just want to force more people to their cloud service subscription...

he is right!! huzzah!