Discrepancy in Photo Counts Between iOS and Mac in Apple Photos with Family Shared Library

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Level 1

4 points

Discrepancy in Photo Counts Between iOS and Mac in Apple Photos with Family Shared Library

Hello,

I’m experiencing a mismatch in the total photo count displayed in Apple Photos between my iOS device and Mac, despite both being synced via iCloud.

Here’s the setup and details:

• Devices and Software: iPhone running iOS 18.6.2 and Mac running macOS 26.0.1.

• iCloud Setup: I have an active iCloud+ subscription with iCloud Photos enabled. We use a Family Shared Photo Library, and on both iOS and Mac, I have both “My Library” and the “Shared Library” selected in the Photos app.

The overall photo library shows different total counts between iOS and Mac.

Specifically, I first noticed this when checking photos of a particular person in the People album—for that person, iOS shows around 400 photos, while Mac shows over 5,000. This suggests some photos might not be fully syncing or displaying on iOS.

I’ve tried force-quitting the Photos app, restarting devices, and checking for iCloud sync status (no errors reported), but the discrepancy persists.

Has anyone encountered this with Family Sharing? Any suggestions on how to resolve it, or steps to force a full resync?

Thanks in advance for any help!

iPhone 12 Pro

Posted on Oct 27, 2025 4:36 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,495 points

Oct 28, 2025 1:52 AM in response to LittlePony87

My iPhone is showing 82671 objects for the iCloud Shared Library, while the Mac is showing only 81848 photos plus 821 videos, slightly less items. It is suspicious that the iPhone is showing "objects", not photos and videos. It could meant, that there are items on the iPhone that are neither compatible photos nor videos and could be causing problems with the syncing.

Is there a message "synchronizing ... objects" on one of your devices?

You want to check on your iCloud webpage at www.icloud.com how many photos and videos are in iCloud. This will help you to recognize, if the problem is, that one of your devices is not uploading or one device is not downloading.

And check the number of items in the Shared Library and the personal library separately.

On my devices there is a slight difference in the number of items in the Shared Library, the items in the personal library are identical. While viewing the Shared library only, use the filter to find out of the missing items are videos or photos or something else.

Filtering the Shared Library on the iPhone for videos only I can see, that the number of videos ist the same as on the Mac.
Filtering the Shared Library on the iPhone for photos only I can see, that the number of Photos ist the same as on the Mac.

Unfortunately I cannot filter for "neither video nor photo" to find the strange items. But I can hide the photos and videos temporarily. The remaining items will be. be the ones, that are neither video nor photo and and cannot sync with iCloud. These items need to be removed.

You may want to try, if you can isolate the items causing the discrepancy the same way.

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Answer 2

Nov 2, 2025 7:31 AM in response to LittlePony87

Most of us don't rely too heavily on the People/Pet albums. If I want to find pictures of Henry, then for some of the interesting ones he'll be looking away, and he won't be identified, anyway. So with Mac Photos, we attach keywords to every person we want identified. We use the People Album to select all the Henrys it has and attach the keywords all at once. The we go for the others. A search with a Smart Album will return all the Henrys.

Since Smart Albums don't show in iOS, we grab all the Henrys in the Mac's Smart Album and choose "File>New Album With Selection" to make a regular album that an iPhone and will see.

A big advantage of using Keywords is that they transfer with pictures in their metadata, while face recognition doesn't, and Keywords survive updating operating systems, and not all face ids do.

You can see this:

Add keywords to photos and videos on Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 3

LittlePony87 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 2, 2025 2:08 AM in response to léonie

Hey, thanks for you reply :)

No, I don't see any difference in item counts between icloud.com, ios, and mac. They all show the same number of items in the library, so is not a probelm of synchorinization but only a problem of "face" recognition.

The other interesting fact is that if I want to set a wallpaper on my phone with photos of certain people, it only shows a single person among all the ones I've given a name. So if I open my iOS photos ap, I can see 10 people under "people & pets", but only one can be selected in the photo suffle wallpaper...quite strange.

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