Every photo appearing in duplicate on my iPhone

[Undecided]

I'm not sure where to post this, because it involves the iPhone, iOS, Mac, and Aperture (potentially) but it's all around photos so here goes.

I don't know how or why, but all my photos appear in duplicate on my phone all of a sudden. I don't mean the same photo appearing in two different albums, I mean every photo is side by side with a duplicate. Instead of 8,500 photos I have 17,000.

It could be iOS5, iOS6, Aperture 3.4, or who knows what. I tried to address it by simply turning off syncing photos and turning it back on, but that didn't work. All photos were still on my phone. In duplicate.

So now I told it to sync a single album with 3 pictures. It's churning and churning on step 5 of 5 for syncing (waiting for changes to be applied). I thought perhaps it was taking a long time to delete 17,000 pictures but the count is not decreasing.

Any ideas?

 

[Laird Knox]

Do you have HDR turned on?

 

[fcortese]

I had the same problem. Turning off the HDR did not help me . I realized that the album/project that I had uploaded to my iPhone from Aperture had all of my versions of a particular photo. Say I did some adjustments of WB, exposure or did some levels adjustment, all versions would be in my album or project that I was syncing with my iPhone and all would appear. By removing the version(s) from the album/project and re-syncing, i was able to get them off of my phone. The original master is still present and intact; only the version disappeared. Hope this helps. At least that was the main issue with my iPhone.

 

[Undecided]

It has nothing to do with HDR or versions - this is thousands of photos that originated elsewhere (scans, digital camera, etc.), as well as the phone.

I let the unsyncing with photos run for a while, and eventually the duplicates were removed. Of course, that left me with some 8,500 photos on my iPhone despite "sync photos" being off.

Through a random combination of syncing with an empty folder, turning off syncing photos, unplugging and plugging back in my iPhone, and turning off wifi sync, it eventually worked itself out. To be honest, I suspect it simply got very confused and was syncing both via wifi and USB without each knowing about the other.

 

[Gerbil1904]

What exactly did you do to stop this? I have 2 copies of every photo and now my Mac does too! I literally have a freaking nightmare going on here!

 

[pmd]

I'm also seeing this on an iPad running iOS6 syncing with Aperture 3.4.x.

I seem to have an extreme case as I have about a 12 copies of every photo, not just one or two!

I haven't spent too much time looking into it but I'll turning off syncing to clear all the photos out, then sync again.