[DigitalEl]

1. Sorry for the length of this.
2. Mods. If you think it better belongs in the Mac OS X forum, please move it. Thank you.

Anyone seen this?

After 4 years without problems, this weekend I can't get all the photos in selected albums to sync to my iDevices. In iTunes, Device is selected in the sidebar. I'm on the Photos tab. I have all the albums I want selected. I sync... And only some of the photos end up on my iOS device. An album with 31 photos will transfer 18. An album with 196 will show 44. Most albums only show 1.

In the space usage bar at the bottom, it'll show .04 GB for photos, when there should be nearly 3 GB. This is all 5 of my iDevices... iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad and an original, 2007 model SIM-less iPhone my kid uses as an iPod touch. All of these devices used to sync fine, from time of purchase through this weekend.

I tried to move my "iTunes Music" folder to the Public folder, so other users on my iMac could use it. This was following Apple Knowledge Base directions. It didn't work. When I moved the file back, this problem started, as did many others.

1. The "iTunes Music" folder moved to the Public folder instantly. The move back to its original space in "Music > iTunes" took 2 hours.
   
2. I started getting all kinds of permissions errors all of a sudden, in Finder, iCal and elsewhere. To solve this I selected my Home folder and changed everything to "Read & Write." In hindsight, I think this was a major error.
   
3. MobileMe Sync stopped working on the iMac, but was fine between the iDevices.

I ended up doing a Time Machine restore from the day prior. All problems persisted. After a blown Saturday and hours of d--king around, MobileMe syncing seems back to normal and I'm not seeing any permissions errors, but the photo sync problem persists.

A quick web search indicates the photo thing seems to be widespread with no surefire cure. I can temporarily make things behave as usual by encrypting my backups, then redoing everything in the Photos tab. But a few syncs later, it shows .47 GB of photos again and only a fraction of my photos are on the iOS device.

Suggestions.

(And again, apologies for the length of this post).

[Jan Knipper]

I seem to have exactly the same. We have the latest version of iTunes running on an iMac and the iPad connected. We try to put all 2200 holiday photo on the iPad. Only 72 photo's actually make it. There is an error message that one of the JPG photo's has an incompatible file format. All photo's are JPG, even the ones that are copied to the iPad.
I have tried to solve the issue by deleting the folder with the iPad cache.

Any solutions?

[Jan Knipper]

Finally I managed to solve the issue. I needed to regenerate the iPhoto database. Below the link that explains how to do that
iPhoto 6 and later: Rebuilding the iPhoto library

Following the regeneration of the database, I needed to follow the following steps:
1) in iTunes, select not to sync any photo's
2) Synchronise the device. All photo's are removed from the device.
3) For the iPad or iPod, it may be necessary to delete the cache file. See iTunes: Understanding the iPod Photo Cache folder on how to do that.
3) in iTunes, make the selections of photo's you want to be copied to your device.
4) Synchronise the device again.

[lupiac]

Thanks very much Jan. I have had the same problem, and used your reply to fix it - but without needing to rebuild the iPhoto library, which is good as that can be a pain (I take reference photos for work, 50 to 150 a day, so I have an immense iPhoto library).

iPhone 3G, Mac OS X Leopard.

1) Selected to Not Sync photos in iTunes
2) Synced, to delete all photos
3) Deleted the iPhoto iPod cache folder per your iTunes: Understanding the iPod Photo Cache folder link
4) reselected in iTunes
5) sychronised again

and all good.

For what it's worth, I think the problem started when I tried to sync two events with the same name a couple of weeks ago.