Many people have been having problems syncing photos from Windows Vista to the iPhone, as can be seen in these threads on the Apple Support Forums; “What is the official way to sincronize photos between iPhone and Vista?“, “Photos won’t sync to iPhone“, “Anyone else having problem with RAID and iTunes syncing photos in Vista?

I too was having the same problems syncing photos, until I came up with the following solution. By default, Windows Vista uses an NTFS file system, and for some reason, this causes problems when syncing photos to the iPhone. In order to sidestep this problem, you’ll

need a USB flash drive, or an external hard drive that is formatted using the FAT32 file system.

Step by step example (We’ll use C:\Documents\Pictures as our default photo directory, swap this out with your actual photo directory. We’ll use F:\ as our FAT32 formatted drive.):

  1. Copy all pictures from your current NTFS formatted drive C:\Documents\Pictures to F:\Pictures (or to a directory of your choice)
  2. Open iTunes and select the new folder that you want to use to sync photos to your iPhone – F:\Pictures
  3. Sync your iPhone and everything should work smoothly.

Prior to moving all of my files to the FAT32 formatted drive, I was only able to sync 45 out of 102 pictures, now all 102 pictures sync to the iPhone with no problem.

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11 Responses

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  • mutui says:

    Thank you, nice explanation. Now it works perfectly :)

  • m_nario says:

    Hi ! please help me regarding my iphone. i bought an i phone in Dubai. i’m not a carrier of AT&T subscriber. so im using my sim card here in dubai.i want to transfer my music to my iphone.. i know that i have to go to itune to sycronize my music. problem is i must not download the new version of itune that is 7.4version because the store that i bought said you must not use the new version because it will going to lock the iphone. You can use is the old version. but im trying to to use the old version that is 6.3version itune or any version .but its not working.i dont know to transfer to i phone.im trying to to look an icon for sycronize in my phone. but i cannot find it. please help! im trying to use the bluetooth transfer but its not working also even the picture. please help. im very ignorant using an apple software.thanks for your HELP!

  • Yev says:

    m_nario >>>

    Version 6.3 doesn’t support iPhone. You’ll need a later version. I believe 7.3 is the first version that starts supporting iPhone.

  • jkcraig says:

    Keeping a separate FAT32 volume sounded excessive (though not necessarily wrong). With some recent digging I found this:
    http://algorizms.blogspot.com/2007/09/fix-for-iphone-sync-times-in-vista.html

    There he says that somehow all the pictures in the ‘Sync photos from:’ folder (not just the checked ones) get looked at and that overwhelms something in the chain. Moving the specific pictures you want to copy into their own folder seems to help.

  • Steve McIntyre says:

    Copying to a new folder still on NTFS works a treat. Why is this? anyone know why? Does it have to optimise the pictures for each ipod. I had the same thing with ipod nano but it worked perfectly with the ipod 80gb classic and updated whenever I sync. Anyway the iphone has imited space so the new folder idea makes sense.

  • Joe says:

    It appears that putting the files on a shared folder over the network then syncing to it works fine too. (the shared folder machine had raid drives as well) If you’re lucky enough to have a second unit give it a try.

  • Honkster says:

    Delete the iPod Photo cache folder on your computer and resync them, it has solved this problem for me every time.

  • Sirap says:

    I just cant seem to find a timestamp on this article/post, sorry to have to say that it makes me not very interested. maybe its my browser

  • Really not sure why a timestamp matters Sirap.

  • simon says:

    Thanks – helped me out – appreciate it.



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