Restricting Apple TV Photo Album Access by room or Apple TV device

Question

Restricting Apple TV Photo Album Access by room or Apple TV device

Is it possible to restrict Apple TV Photo Album access at a granular level by Apple TV rather than globally by the iTunes library "hosting" the Apple TVs?

I know in iTunes one can select which albums are shared with Apple TV under File...Home Sharing...Choose photos to share with Apple TV but the use case here is we'd like to have only certain photo albums available/visible on certain Apple TVs throughout the home.

I cannot see a way to do this, and even the settings for setting up Parental Restrictions on the Apple TV itself are silent on this capability.

I was even go to go through the trouble of creating a separate library to share - but even if I did that, this additional library would be accessible from the Apple TV when selecting Computers, so it seems there is no way to create access to a private or restricted photo album that isn't otherwise freely available on any/all Apple TVs.

Has anyone else solved for this particular use case, and if so could you please share how?

Cheers,

Jcd

Apple TV 4K (3rd generation)

Posted on Jul 17, 2023 2:53 PM

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Answer 1

ace1018

Community Specialist

Jul 18, 2023 12:37 PM in response to WhatNoCoverflow

Hello WhatNoCoverflow,

We'd be happy to provide you with some information. Based on what we were able to find, there isn't a way to restrict albums to certain devices. If you'd like to see what you can do with iCloud Photos on Apple TV, check this out: View iCloud Photos and Shared Photo Library on Apple TV - Apple Support

If you'd like to provide feedback or make a feature request, you can do that here: Product Feedback - Apple

Thanks.

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Answer 2

Jul 18, 2023 12:50 PM in response to ace1018

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply ace1018.

I appreciate the iCloud links and there is interesting capability there to be sure... but alas, this content must remain local to the network: cloud services are a no-go, which precludes use of iCloud.

I may explore setting up a subnet and having a duplicate instance of an iTunes library stored somewhere, which can serve different content. In other words, duplicate the iTunes instance and duplicate movies, music, etc. on a separate server and have a DIFFERENT home sharing with a different target set of photos. It's redundant, but it's only storage space, right? (although about 15TB of it!) ;)

I'll definitely submit a feature request though, because I imagine many would have a similar use case where they might want certain photo albums to remain private (e.g., not accessible by kids, guests, etc.) I think a fairly simple solve would be to improve the granularity of the restrictions/parental controls. For example, if there were the ability to lock out the Settings menu on the Apple TV itself, then what was shared could all be setup and "unchangeable/inaccessible" except with a password...

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Restricting Apple TV Photo Album Access by room or Apple TV device

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