Photos.app is not syncing when using hotspot. How to treat hotspot as a regular Wi-Fi on macOS?

[nickwlker]

Recently I started use hotspot as my home internet. I have unlimited data and high speeds 160/40 Mbps. Everything works well except Photos.app. It just doesn't sync even a single photo.

I contacted Apple support, but it's just a big facepalm.
They asked me to test this problem with other iPhones and MacBooks.
I tested with over 5 devices, as I expected the result was the same.
I wrote them and provided steps to reproduce the problem, but their answer was:

Thank you for the Response. Since the issue is happening on more than 1 iPhone, as I discussed when we spoke on the phone the first time, Its due to the computer needing a stronger connection other than hotspot. There is no need move forward with troubleshooting at this point due to the same thing happening on all the Apple products you have tried. As discussed, we would have continued troubleshooting only if the issue didn’t persist on another Apple product, because then it would have shown that its device specific and this it is not because its all the Apple products you have tried. Thank you for understanding.​

So that's why I am looking for the answer on how to treat hotspot as a regular Wi-Fi on macOS.

macOS 10.14.5; iOS 12.3

 

[nickwlker]

So, finally I got the workaround to solve this issue.

You need to setup a VPN connection for that.
Probably you can use any VPN connection, but I used OpenVPN and used Viscosity as a client.

You can install OpenVPN either locally or using remote server using this bash script.

After connecting to the VPN it assumes that it connected to the real internet not a Wi-Fi hotspot. I assume that it's because it cannot access iPhone router IP address. So theoretically blocking iPhone's local network could work as well.

 

[zorinlynx]

My workaround for this is to connect my iPhone to my Mac with a USB cable and transfer all the photos directly into my Photos library on the Mac.

I can start working on them right away and once the Mac has an Internet connection again it will try to upload the photos and stop because they're duplicates of what's already in iCloud.

This is actually a plus when you're on a trip and taking hundreds of photos and videos because they transfer to your Mac a lot faster over USB than they would with iCloud syncing.