Apple TV screensaver tvOS13

Upgrading to TVOS 13.2 seems to have solved the problem. I've tried a few times to "force" my ATV into sleep and my photos from my Mac thru Home Sharing was still intact. However if I turned power off and the back on, the screen saver had reverted back to arial photos. So partly solved, I guess.

Even if Apple try us to like the screensaver - we don't. They are slow and make my Family fell sleepy.

Apple force us to watch us things we don't want to see. In Germany it's called deliberate coercion. And is hard to believe to be a bug, right? As a huge tech giant such a behavior would never pass quality checks, for sure.

For me it seems like a wanton action crippling Apple TV Photo screensavers to bring people to the menus and confront them with payable contents.

What does it mean? Apple devices transform from devices people love to devices people loosing money, time and identity because the focus turns them into a Hollywood customer more and more.

APPLE is now questionable because it seems to be scourge of his children, iTunes Store, Book Stores and of course AppStore. They have the focus to make consumers to spend there money for digital contents and not help them to remember there life, there family and friends on self taken photos. That is again lost of mankind identity.

For me current screensaver behavior in Apple TV tvOS13.2 is crossing a red line makes me angry writing this. I'm pretty sure others agree to don't miss-use system behaviors into an instrument showing people they never wanted to see!

Sincerely,

Huh interesting, I have done that, it doesn't change things for me - reverting to Aerial whenever I switch power for ATV off. Are there any news relating to this problem? Inroads? Work arounds? It's the kind of update I like - everything worked great for me before. :(

Thanks for your reply, am switching off all tech stuff every night and am not feeling like increasing my electricity bill because of Apple, not even by a couple of cents. ;) Just tried the work around via Icloud and realised that fotos on mac and in icloud have different folder structures - makes a lot of sense - and if that wasn't enough, one can only upload JPEGs into Icloud. Feels like back to 20th century. Think I'll wait if they fix their bug, and if not, so be it. Bad look for a leading tech company tho methinks.

The screen saver using your photos from iCloud has been an utter mess for years.

Sometimes Screen Saver Settings doesn't even see the photos or folders; sometimes it allows you to set what you want but it won't work under the preview and then doesn't work as a screen saver, and when this happens sometimes the screen saver never turns on, sometimes it goes black, sometimes it's black with a spinning icon, sometimes it reverts to Aerial; and on the rare occasion when it does work, I often end up seeing just the same a few photos repeated over and over and over and over again. I've seen all this on my Apple TV 4, but since changing to a 4K the other day, all I see is near exactly the behavior the original poster described - despite my setting it to My Photos, using Preview just shows a black screen with a never-ending circular status indicator, and when left to drop into Screen Saver on its own... there's Aerial, showing the same short clip of downtown LA for the hundredth time.

I've tried myriad options to make it work, and make it stable, and it's just this ongoing mess... now continuing for me over 3 generations of Apple TV devices from Apple TV 3 to Apple TV4K . I keep expecting Apple to sort it out (and maybe, just maybe, add new features or flexibility), but instead they amazingly just make it worse.

I've got around 70,000 photos in iCloud Photos; seeing them rotating on the Apple TV while music plays is my #1 use of the Apple TV, by far. So this fail in the most basic functionality of the product is extremely disappointing and frustrating.

These days I had read a book about an ingenious CEO of a big technology company. He asked his employees what the main tasks of the cloud product they offered were. His employees gave him a lot of answers. He replied in an audible and energetic manner: "And why doesn't the product fulfill these tasks?.."

Any one know this book, too?

The screensaver problem is far worse in 13.3. Now trying to use Home Sharing/Photos results in the spinning wheel of death. The TV app is worse, too - the Up Next list gets populated with stuff you may have watched a long time ago, and it no longer syncs at all with iOS or macOS devices. That a total mess of a release.

Oh my #$%&^@#!, you're right.

I can't get it to work at all now.

(I don't even use the TV app, it's such a UI clustereff)

This product has gone from grotesquely neglected to a sad joke.

Stay away, anyone who hasn't yet already.

Thank you, rank. I may give it a try, as again, this is the one most-used function on my Apple TV... but seeing as how I am logged into iCloud on no fewer than 6 devices, and my iCloud Photo Library has 70,000+ pictures/movies, it's not exactly easy.

Apple, this is totally absurd, and completely unacceptable.

P.S. It's amazing how much more consistently helpful "Level 1" users with the same problem are on this forum that the "Level 9" users who come along to copy and paste some knowledge-base article that anybody dealing with this issue has already found, and found useless.

So here’s a question, we are in the Apple forum, does anyone get a response from Apple saying anything! I’m sick and tired of updates that totally screw things up that are working just fine! The screensavers, auto play when watching TV showed you’ve purchased...if it’s not broke don’t fix it! 😡🤬

Same problem here. If I go into my photo library in home sharing it seems to create a black image where any screenshots or non-jpegs are. There’s TONS of them now. If I disconnect home sharing, the issue remains. I’ve found if I disconnect, reimport said photos, it’ll work. But it’s hundreds of photos. If I clear the cache in the apple tv library in Photos, it will just remove them from home sharing entirely! They’ll still be in my Photos library but completely gone in Home Sharing. No black box, just gone. The photos library home sharing screensaver will populate the black boxes in the mix. Then, after a sleep of the box it reverts to Aerial screensaver anyway. What a complete mess. I’ve called Apple numerous times and literally spent hours troubleshooting with the Cloud team. Nothing. They told me to upgrade to cloud photos so I did. Same issue remained, just more money spent. Also i’ve found the iTunes screensaver no longer plays music when you click on a specified album artwork. When I asked Apple they said “that’s now the iTunes Artwork Screensaver and no longer plays music.” Even though there’s a play icon, they don’t fix it, they just rename it and keep the broken functionality. Ridiculous that there’s no fix after a year and no plans to in site. Apple has been going downhill significantly lately. I miss Jobs. I think it’s time to head to Google.

I don't use Home Sharing (everything is off of my iCloud Photos Library... or would be, if this wasn't totally broken), but everything else you describe sadly looks familiar.

Has Apple just completely stopped supporting the Apple TV, and never informed us, all while they just keep incrementing the version number? Because the amount of bugs and major flaws in this software is utterly mindblowing.

Ugh... upgrading to Catalina seems to not help either. Home Sharing is now in System Preferences and if the connection to the computer/laptop is severed, it doesn’t work. So frustrating. New OS and it’s buggier than ever.

Same deal here. Used to be able to view a folder of hi-res personal photos selected in iTunes > Home Sharing. One of the main reasons I bought an ATV years ago. Now nothing shows up in the "Computer" icon like it used to in "my Library', no matter what I try.

Eastdog says "...I'm sure I'm just going to see yet another "Level 9" "volunteer" trot out with some to insultingly inapplicable link to some perfunctory knowledge base article, or canned advice like "Have you tried restarting your device?" or "Are you logged into iCloud?". How True!!

Apple can build more multi-million dollar campuses, hire thousands of more employees, spend millions on tv shows and movies but they can't give us a product/service that used to work. Unbelievable and disgusting...

Had similar symptoms. Home Sharing on Apple TV would not show any photos (for Apple TV > Settings > General > Screen Saver > Type > Home Sharing > Photos), no matter which way sharing was configured on Mac (System Preferences > Sharing > Media Sharing > Home Sharing > Share Photos with Apple TV > Share Photos from [Photos > Album | Choose Folder ... > Finder folder of photos]). Music can be streamed from Mac to AppleTV4K, so all those other prerequisites were demonstrated to be already in place.

AppleCare showed me this workaround: (for Mac OS X 10.15.2 / Catalina, TVos 13.3)

[1] Check: Apple TV > Settings > Users and Accounts > iCloud > Shared Albums is ON. Open Apple TV app Photos, check that Shared is an option in menu bar at top.

[2] From Mac Photos App, *share* an album (or some set of photos) to be used as screensaver to "Shared Albums".

[3] On Apple TV > Settings > General > Screen Saver > Type > My Photos > <shared_album>.

~~~

Screensaver now runs the selected screensaver using the Shared Album (when screensaver was activated by going to top level menu on ATV and pressing Menu button one more time).

Waiting now to see if the settings all 'stick' and persist through on/off/sleep cycles of the ATV ... see if the workaround is a useable one.