Photos Sync partially broken?

[ihakim]

I have an iPhone XR running iOS 12.1.4 and a late 2011 MacBook Pro running High Sierra 10.13.6. I use iCloud Photo sync with a paid plan to sync pictures between my iPhone and MacBook. I've now noticed that while pictures sync fine, certain edits don't. Cropping on iPhone syncs to my Mac. All Mac changes sync to the iPhone without issue.

Auto-enhance changes or any of the sliders on iPhone do not sync to the Mac. The actual image is edited, but the sliders on the Mac don't reflect this. Therefore, I can click the auto enhance button on my Mac and then the picture gets "double enhanced." This is frustrating because pictures that appear stock via the editing tools on my mac are actually already enhanced via iPhone so I don't want them getting edited twice. When I view picture on iCloud.com, they all match my iPhone. This leads me to believe the issue is with Photos on my MacBook displaying the edited picture but not actually moving the editing slidesrs in the photos app.

It makes me wonder if Apple purposely broke Photos sync to get me to upgrade my MacBook just like they broke Books sync and even informed me of it when I updated my OS. Perhaps this is due to new editing features that last year's Photos cannot support in its interface when it tries to sync with Photos on the iPhone.

 

[ltb7]

have you tried signing out of icloud and re-syncing photos? just make sure you do a back up to google photos or external drive just in case

also, you could try making a new library and see if that helps

 

[ihakim]

have you tried signing out of icloud and re-syncing photos? just make sure you do a back up to google photos or external drive just in case

also, you could try making a new library and see if that helps

Tried both of those and no change. Even made a new user account on my computer and it doesn’t work. What does work is syncing with an old iPhone 5s on iOS 12 or my wife’s computer on macOS Mojave. I think Apple just broke syncing edits between iOS 12 and High Sierra. Seems they are trying really hard to get me to upgrade.

 

[ltb7]

Tried both of those and no change. Even made a new user account on my computer and it doesn’t work. What does work is syncing with an old iPhone 5s on iOS 12 or my wife’s computer on macOS Mojave. I think Apple just broke syncing edits between iOS 12 and High Sierra. Seems they are trying really hard to get me to upgrade.

on my macbook air (can not be updated, as 2011 like yours) all of my pics are not there so you may be spot on - since I use iPhone for photos + do not want to potentially mess with everything else that is syncing + working fine on the air, letting it ride until next upgrade - made photo b/u on google photos just in case - all good as well syncing iCloud + my iPhones/iPads with latest update in reference to photos

 

[ihakim]

I think your issue may be beyond mine from what you're describing. In my case, I don't have any issues with pictures themselves syncing. My Mac and iPhone pictures are perfectly synced and when i take or delete pictures on one device, the same happens on the other. In my case, it's just the edits I make to pictures on my phone where the sliders don't appropriately move on my mac like they do when I sync to a Mojave computer.

One thing I noticed a few days ago when I was experimenting was that the same behavior is present with the Books app on my phone and Mac. The books themselves sync, but any markup, bookmarks, etc. do not. In this case, Apple had actually warned about breaking sync in Books when I upgraded to iOS 12 last year so even more confirms my suspicions.