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I’m on round three trying to sync as well. What’s worse is the iPhone changed the date on about 80 photos it had downloaded on the phone to the day it downloaded them instead of the date they were taken and changed that in my photo library. Annoying.
 
Well, at least I know I'm not alone in it. This time I'm going to try and not open the photo app over night and see if that fixes the issue. One time that I did the restore I got more photos (maybe 10 more) and that time I didn't open the photo app for a while. Hoping that works... I honestly have no good answer and I'm not sure apple does either. I'm going to try and warranty it if this doesn't work.
 
When I set mine up on Friday, by Sunday it had said I had 40,000 photos and it was up to date, but I have 53,000 photos and it stopped updating. I tried turning off icloud photo library off and on again, but that made things worse, as it wouldn't download photos at all.

I plugged my phone into my computer and delete the photo sqlite database with ifunbox and it started downloading again, overnight I was back to the same 40,000 photos and now my albums are empty.

Been almost a week and still don't have my photo library full synced. I have it on plugged in and I can scroll though the photos and get them to come in. another annoying thing is the screen keeps flashing when pictures are loaded. I picture will load, show the thumbnail, flash back to gray show the thumbnail over and over again.

It's making me want to throw my phone across the room very frustrating.

When iCloud photos first was released I tried to set everything up as well. Big photo library too about 43,000 photos. I had nothing but problems and issues. Turned it off and haven’t tried since .
 
Well, I finally got mine transferred. I did a hard restore using my mac and iTunes and that still didn't work so I went to the Apple store to talk with someone at the genius bar. He messed with it for nearly 1.5hrs and concluded my best bet was restoring it again and setting it up as a new iPhone then connecting it to iCloud iPhoto and seeing it would download. I asked what the difference between that and disconnecting iCloud's iPhoto from my phone which was already up and running vs doing that. Then I did the turning off the iPhoto in iCloud and turning it back on then it miraculously started downloading. My advice is to make sure it is connected to wifi and plugged into a charger.
 
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I chose to setup from a back from my iPhone 7 Plus. Unfortunately everything but my pictures transferred over. I use iCloud Photo Library I’m wondering if anyone else had the same issue ?


I have been having this problem with my iPhone and Apple TV 4th gen for more than a month now. I noticed it on 6 December 2017, contacted apple support on 21 December 2017. Till now I didnt get a solution and I have only 250 photos out of more than 5,000 on iCloud.

I have tried everything and Apple technicians have locked my iCloud to understand whats going on. Remarkably my iPad pro is working and downloading photos and videos (though at a specific day in the week only). My iphone downloads couple of photos on the same day of the week (like a window) but given this rate I have calculated that I need 13 years to get all my photos from the iCloud.

For all who wants to try photo library be warned.
 
Well, I finally got mine transferred. I did a hard restore using my mac and iTunes and that still didn't work so I went to the Apple store to talk with someone at the genius bar. He messed with it for nearly 1.5hrs and concluded my best bet was restoring it again and setting it up as a new iPhone then connecting it to iCloud iPhoto and seeing it would download. I asked what the difference between that and disconnecting iCloud's iPhoto from my phone which was already up and running vs doing that. Then I did the turning off the iPhoto in iCloud and turning it back on then it miraculously started downloading. My advice is to make sure it is connected to wifi and plugged into a charger.

So how did you finally get your older photos to download? Can you tell your actions step by step?
 
I do not have iCloud Photo Library enabled at all as I didn't want all my photos online for other devices etc.
I just enabled iCloud Backup, which backs up all photos too.
I then did a complete restore to my new iPhoneX and everything came down fine.
 
I just solved my problem of older photos not downloading to my new phone. I use icloud photo libary. But eachtime I restore the downloaded photos remained at the same date. Visit genius bar, made phone support etc no good. I just deleted the 3 days of photos from icloud.com where the phone was stuck downloading. One day before-stuck date and one day after. Ofcourse I downloaded these photos to my computer before. Then delete them and also clear from the last deleted album. And immediately after that my new iphone started downloading all my 14.000 photos where it was at 3400 photos for the last months.

I check to see that one of the photo name is OUTPUT.JPG unlike other photo names. I think this made the icloud server stop to download.
 
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