iPhone 12 Pro Max Permanent "Syncing..." message at bottom of photo gallery?

[SergioRZ]

On my old iPhone 11 Pro and new 12 Pro Max I always see a message of "Sycing..." at the lower section of All Photos or Recent Album.

It's there every day, 24h/day... What could it be? Syncing what with what?

I have Photos turned OFF for iCloud, never used it.


Sometimes I see a white circle on the lower corner of photos I just made, it seems to be related to iCloud somehow... but I don't use it for photos.


Anyone else with the same issue?

 

[Minorite]

Have you used it before? Try toggling iCloud Photo Library on/off maybe and if won't help, sign out/in to iCloud. Another idea, have you synced any photos from iTunes/Finder?

 

[SergioRZ]

Never used iCloud to backup photos.

Sometime when I bought my old 11P, I had some issue/problem migrating from iPhone 8 and for some reason I had to copy photos back from my Windows PC to the iPhone 11P... can't remember exactly what I did back then, but probably used iTunes somehow to put those photos on the then new 11P. That resulted in the creation of a folder (?) in IOS called "From my Mac" (that was a little weird because I have no Mac hehehhe) with all those photos, some 9000 files.

So... today I tried to enable iCloud Photos, it gave me a warning about deleting the "Finder Sync" photos, and it did... those 9000 files and "Mac" folder were deleted from the iPhone 12PM.

Then, because I have a 50GB iCloud plan... it couldn't enable Photos as the space required would be some 60+ GB... I ended up in the same spot, but with 9000 photos deleted from the phone (yes have them elsewhere).

I will try to logout and login from iCloud later... will it delete something from the phone?

 

[SergioRZ]

OK I tried to log out and log back in from iCloud but unfortunately the problem persists. Still always Syncing...

 

[SergioRZ]

This issue is now fixed.

I had to fully restore the phone to factory state (from iTunes) and setup as a new phone. It was the only way to make the permanent "Sync..." message go away.

I still have the occasional white circle on the lower corner of photos I just shot, if I open them from the camera app tapping the photo preview. Don't know why that happens...

This circle is not shown if I go to the photos app and open the image there.