Cannot get Home Sharing -> Share photos with Apple TV with my Photos library to work in Catalina

I had all but one of my Photos albums in folders, some nested 3 levels. The album in the top level of My Albums was the only one that could be shared with AppleTV using Home Sharing. It took several hours to move all of my albums out of their nested folders into the top level of My Albums, but that solved the problem. I can now share any of the albums that I want with AppleTV using Home Sharing and I can sync any album that I want to my iPhone. I am not thrilled that I had to get rid of my folder structure in Photos, but AppleTV and iOS Photos App never recognized the folders anyway.

If any albums in the Photos library on your Mac are inside any folders that you created in Photos, then you may have to move those albums out of the folders and leave them in the top level of My Albums in Photos. Please see my message above your reply.

BTW, you no longer need to open iTunes to use Home Sharing. Did you go to System Preferences -> Sharing, click on Media Sharing, click on Home Sharing, click on Share photos with Apple TV, and then click the Choose... button and select any albums to share?

I tried your procedure, but without success. I have 26,314 photos in 1,037 albums and it was easier to navigate the albums when I had them organized in folders nested 3 levels deep. The help for Photos in Catalina still shows that you can create nested folders with albums in them, but makes no mention of sharing the folders with Apple TV.

I noticed that the Apple TV Photo Cache folder inside the Photos Library on my Mac was recreated the first time I tried to view photos on the ATV. The Apple TV Photo Database file inside the Apple TV Photo Cache folder is modified whenever I make a successful choice to share an album with Apple TV.

It looks like your Apple TV is an HD version. I have a 4K Apple TV, so maybe the difference in Apple TV versions makes a difference with this issue.

Selecting an album in the top level of My Albums works, but selecting an album inside a folder under My Albums still fails for me. The funny thing is that the folder appears on the ATV, but without any albums inside. It looks like Apple tried to allow folders in the Home Sharing for photos on ATV, which would make browsing easier. Very frustrating for me.

I finally got the idea last night to try Home Sharing -> Share photos with Apple TV -> Share Photos from: Photos -> Share: All photos and albums instead of Share: Selected albums. Wouldn't you know that actually worked with albums inside nested folders in my Photos library.

I spent about two hours reorganizing my albums into folders including nested folders like I had before the Catalina upgrade. All of these folders are available in Apple TV, which is much better than scrolling down through dozens of albums.

I would prefer to select albums to share with Apple TV, but I can live with sharing all photos and albums.

I finally got the idea last night to try Home Sharing -> Share photos with Apple TV -> Share Photos from: Photos -> Share: All photos and albums instead of Share: Selected albums. Wouldn't you know that actually worked with albums inside nested folders in my Photos library.

I spent about two hours reorganizing my albums into folders including nested folders like I had before the Catalina upgrade. All of these folders are available in Apple TV, which is much better than scrolling down through dozens of albums.

I would prefer to select albums to share with Apple TV, but I can live with sharing all photos and albums.

You might want to try restarting the Apple TV before trying to access your photos. Possibly a very large number of photos being shared will take significant time for the Apple TV to process.

Also, if you made any changes to the Photos Library on your Mac, you should reboot the Mac before going into Home Sharing to choose to share your Photos Library with Apple TV, otherwise the albums browser will not show the changes.

BTW, I am having the same problem with syncing albums from my Photos Library on my Mac to an iPhone or iPad (now done in a Finder window in Catalina, no longer from iTunes). Albums inside a folder in the Photos Library will not sync unless I change from Selected albums to All photos and albums (very slow on my 2012 vintage iPad Air).

It looks like the problem is inside Home Sharing in Catalina. Hopefully Apple will fix this in the next update.

Home sharing of Photos to Apple TV did not work for me until I changed it from "Selected albums" to "All photos and albums". I was not happy about this, but it worked.

You might want to try restarting both the Mac and the Apple TV after making any changes either to Home Sharing or to your Photos library.

I also found that the Home Sharing screen saver on the Apple TV reverted to Aerial whenever my home network was shut down, which I have done several times over the last two weeks when trying different modems, routers, and Wi-Fi units.