iCloud Photos stuck syncing for months on Family Sharing plan — Apple Support couldn't fully fix it. Also broken "iCloud Storage Details" page. Anyone seen this?
Problem 1: iCloud Photos stuck at 0 items for months
Her iPhone showed "Syncing Paused" under Photos > Collections, with 0 items ever synced to iCloud — this went on for a couple of months. She was on WiFi the whole time and correctly using the shared 6TB storage (not a personal plan).
Everything I tried:
- Confirmed WiFi + charging, disabled Low Power Mode
- Freed up local device storage (iPhone was at 122.94GB/128GB used — cleared app caches for Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Spotify, got it down to ~112GB)
- Restarted the iPhone multiple times
- Signed out/back into iCloud
- Checked Screen Time restrictions and configuration profiles (VPN & Device Management) — nothing blocking
- Checked for iOS updates
- Toggled "Sync this iPhone" (iCloud Photos) off then back on — got a warning that 22 items couldn't download in full resolution, chose to accept losing those since ~6,700+ other items were confirmed as untouched full-resolution originals already on the device (meaning they'd never actually synced/optimized in the first place)
- Did a full Network Settings reset
Result: After the toggle + network reset, it finally shifted from "Syncing Paused" to actively "Syncing," with a progress bar working through a batch of "6,371 items." Storage usage on her account slowly started climbing from ~7.2GB. So it seems to be moving now, but took a huge amount of manual troubleshooting to get there, and I still don't know what actually caused the months-long stall.
Problem 2: "iCloud Storage Details" page is broken — confirmed account-side
Separately, trying to view her detailed storage breakdown fails everywhere:
- On her iPhone: "Manage Storage" screen shows a persistent black/blank screen, every time
- On icloud.com from a laptop: "There was a problem loading your iCloud Storage Details"
Since it fails identically on two totally different devices, this has to be something broken with her account on Apple's servers, not a local device bug.
I contacted Apple Support and walked them through all of this. They had me try a few more general troubleshooting steps but ultimately weren't able to explain or fix the Storage Details bug, or definitively tell me what caused the original sync stall.
Has anyone dealt with either of these issues before? Curious if this is a known bug with Family Sharing accounts specifically, or something else.