Photos not downloading originals on new iPad Pro 12.9”

[slyronit]

I bought an iPad Pro 11” 512Gb a few weeks ago. It downloaded all iCloud Photos for offline use overnight, no problem. I bought an iPad Pro 12.9” on Christmas. It refused to download photos for offline use. I left it overnight 2 nights and it has not downloaded a single photo by itself.

I tried the workarounds mentioned in these forums. Toggling frantically between optimise and download, nothing.

Another workaround was selecting photos and playing a slide show. Unfortunately when I select too many photos, the menu which has the slide show option appears only for a fraction of a second before disappearing.

I also factory reset once and flashed IPS, no difference.

Any ideas what it can be?

 

[slyronit]

I factory reset again and set it up from scratch without restoring backup, same.
I would contact Apple, but there’s no chat support in my country, only phone and it is excruciatingly painful for me.

 

[slyronit]

After the latest factory reset and not restoring backup, even though the counter of downloading photos is not decrementing, I can see photos using up steadily more space, although very slowly. I will take what I can get.

 

[Morac]

Unfortunately downloading originals since 17.1 has been problematic. I’m not sure if it’s really 17.1 or iCloud since MacOS Sonoma has the same problem, but downloading originals frequently gets stuck. For a small number of photos and videos you can edit them to force a download, but that obviously is not realistic for lots of photos. You don’t really have a choice other than to just leave it plugged in and wait for it to finish. If downloading completely stops (like nothing updates overnight), restarting the iPad should get it going again.

Really the photo app doesn’t work well in iOS 17. It frequently won’t even sync because it’s busy “optimizing system performance” or what not. The MacOS Sonoma Photo app has the same problem.

 

[slyronit]

Unfortunately downloading originals since 17.1 has been problematic. I’m not sure if it’s really 17.1 or iCloud since MacOS Sonoma has the same problem, but downloading originals frequently gets stuck. For a small number of photos and videos you can edit them to force a download, but that obviously is not realistic for lots of photos. You don’t really have a choice other than to just leave it plugged in and wait for it to finish. If downloading completely stops (like nothing updates overnight), restarting the iPad should get it going again.

Really the photo app doesn’t work well in iOS 17. It frequently won’t even sync because it’s busy “optimizing system performance” or what not. The MacOS Sonoma Photo app has the same problem.

Such a shame. Fortunately, this is not something I need to work immediately

 

[slyronit]

What I noticed was, before the iPad starts downloading the original sized images, it needs to download and populate the thumbnails/low-quality versions of all the images.

When I checked the status via the Photos app, I saw it was happening painfully slow. Like 1 photo per second. I watched the progress for many hours. Some time around 15:20 ICT, the process became exponentially faster, entire page in less than a second.

After all the thumbnails/low-quality images populated, the originals started downloading without issues.

So looks like there was some limitation on Apple's server that resolved and fixed the issue.

 

[slyronit]