I have been having problems syncing my iPhone. An Error Message was displayed:
"Joel's iPhone cannot be synced. The required file cannot be found."
After further examination, I found that the only thing not syncing was my photos.
So I did some searching on the web. Found lots of people with similar problems, but none of the solutions worked, and many of the solutions were rather heavy handed, such as erase your iPhone.
During this troubleshooting, I discovered that some of my albums would sync fine, and others would not.
Next thing I tried was deleting one of the albums that would not sync, and then recreating the album from scratch in iPhoto.
Even the newly-created iPhoto album would result in the error above.
I even tried syncing my entire iPhoto album (as a means of bypassing strange "album" data.
Same error.
But during this troubleshooting, I noticed that iTunes would go through a routine, "optimizing photos". This is the process were iTunes makes the images smaller and optimized for display on the iPhone, to conserve storage space and increase performance. Then I thought, it is probably one of these "optimized" photos that has become corrupt, and that iPhoto is maintaining a library of these optimized photos. That would explain why recreating the album from scratch wouldn't resolve the problem - once a photo is optimized, iPhoto reuses that photo.
So here is the fix:
- Turn off Photo syncing in iTunes
- Quit iTunes
- Quit iPhoto if it is running
- Right-click on your iPhoto Library and open the package contents
- Inside the iPhoto Library package, will be a folder called "iPod Photo Cache". Delete this folder.
- Empty the trash
- Launch iTunes and re-enable Photo Syncing
- Sync
You will see iTunes go through its process of "Optimizing photos" for each of your photos, essentially rebuilding that Cache folder you threw away.
Problem solved.
Comments
Aaron (unauthenticated)
May 4, 2010
Came here hoping this would fix my problem since I can't find any help anywhere on this weird issue. This did not work for me. WTF. :(