iOS 4.3 “The required file cannot be found.” Sync Error

By now, most of you iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch folks would probably already be on iOS 4.3. But there’s one thing that might have bugged you a whole lot. If you happened to sync a huge load of photos via iTunes to your iDevice, chances are, you’d notice that the photos may not fit in the available storage anymore.

Worse still, you may even get the “The required file cannot be found.” error and not able to sync the photos at all!

It seems that with iOS 4.3, iTunes will now ‘optimize’ the photos with a higher resolution version of the photo cache to be synchronized to the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. And with that, iTunes is now estimating a much higher storage requirement for your photos. But more on this later. First, let’s get your sync working again!

And it seems that the fix is actually fairly simple. All you need to do is to uncheck the Sync Photos option in iTunes, click Apply and remove all the photos from your iDevice in that process.

Once that’s done, I’d suggest that you pick and choose the albums and events that you want to be synchronized. Once you’ve done so, just click on Apply again to get iTunes to sync it. You’ll notice that iTunes would ‘optimize’ all those photos again with this mysterious higher resolution.

Now, there are also quite a bunch of online buzz around this issue and it seems that there may actually be a bug in iTunes on how it calculates the space required for the photos on the iDevice and therefore causing this problem to happen in the first place.

Some users have reported that upon synchronizing the photos, it seems that the required space on the iDevice is actually less than initially reported on iTunes and they could eventually synchronize all the photos back into the iPad/iPhone by selecting to sync the albums and events a few at a time.

You might want to give that a try too! I know I’ll be once this first initial ‘re-optimization’ completes…