All of my 2025 Photos on my iPhone have disappeared and won't sync anymore.

Question

Level 1

98 points

All of my 2025 Photos on my iPhone have disappeared and won't sync anymore.

The last 10 months of my photos have disappeared from my iPhone 13 running iOS version 18.6.2. The same has happened from my wife's phone (same phone and iOS version). We only sync our phones with our desktop computers--a 2020 intel iMac and a 2024 Mac mini--via a USB cable and the finder window, both running Sequoia 15.7.2.

I've tried everything I can think of including rebuilding the photos library on each of our desktops and then resending via cable (we do not use iCloud for any of our music or Photos). No messages were issued during the syncs leading me to think they were supposedly successful, but all of the photos from this year are missing on the phones.

It's really odd as this has worked fine for at least the last 4 years.

iPhone 13 Pro

Posted on Nov 28, 2025 9:32 PM

Reply

Answer 1

LD150

Level 10

100,227 points

Nov 30, 2025 1:31 AM in response to Jeff Wiseman

Jeff Wiseman wrote:

Yes, that is all exactly correct. AND that is the way we've been doing it for many years without problems.

...

I assume that means they are All safe on the Macs, just the sync back fails.

I have no idea how a whole year is skipped.

You could open a thread with the fully described situation in our Photos forum.

Depends on your volume but with under, say, 20,000 photos it would only cost £$2.99 a month to have them in icloud Photos, full size on the Macs, and sync to the phones automatically.

You could even open a Shared library, it's what mrs LD and I do. The only downside is that currently the owner's Album structure cannot be seen by the sharing user.

Reply

Answer 2

Jeff Wiseman Author

Level 1

98 points

Dec 2, 2025 12:27 PM in response to LD150

Yep, no problem uploading photos. Just the sync via finder appears broken. The workflow that you've suggested has always been the way we have done it. Also by using this workflow I don't have to worry about backups for phones since they are all captured in the main backups I do for our desktop computers.

Yes, and my wife is missing over 2 years of the most recent pictures on her phone. And this is in addition to random pictures being lost from earlier times as well. The behavior is consistent. It's just odd to me that such an obvious fault in such a basic function doesn't seem to have been seen by others (yet). But if everyone is using iCloud, that might explain it.,

I know that it isn't a resource issue as over half the memory in my phone is still unused at the present and I only have about 3600 photos and 100 videos being sync'ed.

Thank you very much for the work around suggestions. However, I'm really more interested in finding out why the basic photos sync via usb/finder (which has always worked for me before) no longer functions and how to get it fixed. I really am not interested in paying Apple money for iCloud resources that I don't want or need--especially if it is just to be a work around for a macOS feature that Apple themselves may have broken. The only things that have change for us over the past many months is the occasional MacOS and iOS updates that we have made.

Reply

Answer 3

LD150

Level 10

100,227 points

Dec 2, 2025 2:06 PM in response to Jeff Wiseman

It's been a few years since I last used that workflow. I still suggest a new thread in Photos forum as nobody has yet come to our aid here.

Reply

Answer 4

LD150

Level 10

100,227 points

Nov 29, 2025 5:54 AM in response to Jeff Wiseman

So you don't use iCloud photos? Are they still on the Mac in Photos app?

The normal workflow is connect iPhone to Mac, Open Photos in Mac, import new photos whilst (Optionally) deleting from iphone during the process, then Sync back to iPhone in Finder.

Is that your normal workflow?

Reply

Answer 5

Jeff Wiseman Author

Level 1

98 points

Nov 29, 2025 1:23 PM in response to LD150

Yes, that is all exactly correct. AND that is the way we've been doing it for many years without problems.

The importing and deleting from the iPhone has always worked fine (except for when I've forgotten to do the auto delete after import from iPhone resulting in the inevitable duplication of pics in my photos library later on).

My wife and I have just recently noticed this incomplete downloading of pics during syncs. It may have coincided with one of the iPhone updates that we made a week or so ago to iOS 18.6.2 on our iPhone 13 Pros, or recent updates to the macOS 15.7.2 on her iMac and my M4 Mac Mini.

Assuming that something was silently failing during the sync I did a rebuild of the Photos libraries on the desktops, then from finder, deleted the Photos Library on the iPhones followed by another sync to download the Photos library again.

In spite of the fact that the syncs didn't result in any failures, we both had 1 to 2 years of the most recent pictures missing from our iPhones. I then went back and started comparing the photos on the iPhones with the desktop libraries and discovered that even those did not quite match up. Although most of the photos on the Desktop computers showed up on the iPhones, I did find several that didn't make it in various places. One here, two there, and I saw some groups of 4 or 5 pics missing in other places. Furthermore, the Photo counts on the iPhones were a couple hundred to a thousand items less than the counts on the Desktop sources.

Something is definitely broken here as we've not seen this for years up until the last several weeks.

Reply