iOS5 seems to have broken photo syncing on my iPad. Not only that, but if I take a screen shot using the iPad OR save a photo from the internet on it, nothing seems to happen. When I open the Photos app, I get told that there are no photos. Tapping on the events tab shows a bunch of empty place holders. Tapping on Albums results in a crash.

iTunes seems to go through the motions of syncing photos to the iPad, though sometimes it will report that some pictures can’t be displayed on the iPad. That doesn’t explain the apparent evidence that picture data has been moved from the Mac to the iPad. Progress bars in iTunes and a report that pictures are taking up a certain amount of space.

Anyway, I’ve trued the following:

1 - Switching photo syncing off, syncing, and then back on again and syncing again - no dice.

2 - Switching photo syncing from Aperture to iPhoto, syncing, and then back again to Aperture followed by another sync. Again - no change.

3 - Deleting the iPod Cache folder from the Aperture library bundle (as recommend by an Apple tech note), and then syncing. Again, nothing.

4 - Rebuilding the Aperture database. Syncing again - no change here either.

Also tried syncing using a USB cable instead of over WiFi - no difference.

I am now restoring the iPad to factory settings, and waiting for a restore to finish. I’ll see if that makes a difference. My thoughts are that somewhere along the way an XML file (or similar) which describes the photo database has become corrupted or damaged, causing the iPad to fail. There’s no way (that I can find) to force the iPad itself to rebuild its internal photo database.

I am finding reports out there in Internet Land of similar problems, so I’m not alone in this.

EDIT: The full restore didn’t work either.

Sign up for a free dev account and log the bug here: http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/

I've not had the problem before...


Actually, if you can get into a shop In guess they do much the same thing...?

I am beginning to wonder if it’s iTunes that’s the culprit. When I look at the photo count in the Photo sync tab for the iPad, it displays an incorrect number of photos for each album. In a lot of cases 1 or 0. It gets to syncing around 60 pictures and then bails, reporting that the iPad won’t be able to display one or more images.

Mind you, what I have on the iPad is now surreal.Hundreds of duplicate events, most empty. The few that have a thumbnail display are using the wrong pictures, and the photos contained are very low resolution. More investigation required.

EDIT: I think it’s iTunes. I’ve just synced my iOS 4 iPhone, and it’s put very few images on their. It’s like iTunes isn’t seeing what’s in the Aperture library correctly.

I eventually solved the problem - or rather partially. I suspected that there was something amiss with the image database. As my syncing tests progressed, I found that the number of blank events on the iPad doubled each time. I was also noticing that some of these events were getting thumbnails, with the collection of associated images when I tapped on them being totally different.

The database was, I concluded, corrupted. It was a case of either restoring the iPad, and NOT restoring from a backup (and risking losing all my apps’ settings), or finding a way to reset the database. I managed to find instructions for the latter here:

http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/how-to/how ... in-itunes/

There is a Mac application that exposes the iOS device as a volume on your computer, it was a case of using this to delete the corrupted database files. The iPad then rebuilt the database when I opened the Photos app. None of my synced iTunes images were there (as expected), but all of the screen shots I had taken and thought I had lost were there.

Syncing from iTunes is still a problem. For example, if I tell it to sync only projects from the last 12 months, it seems to select pretty much every project going back to 2004. So I’ve manual selected the projects I want to sync to help save on space on the iPad.

So corrupted database problem solved. iTunes is buggy and not reading my Aperture library properly. Ho hum.