Old imac without airplay

Murimac4 wrote:

So if I buy a 512 GB memory stick it could contain more than half of my pictures and videos, but can I just copy it from iPhoto and it will be a format that the TV can read?

Almost certainly. ExFAT can be read and written to by both windows and mac, so that's how every flash drive I've bought was formatted.

And on the TV, how can I control the pictures? On the computer I can choose what I want to watch with iPhoto or Fotos, but when I just connect the memory stick to the TV, there will be nothing to control anything. How will I find the pictures from Nagorno Karabakh or Timbuktu or my 70th birthday? On the computer it is all by date and subject.

On my somewhat older LG TV, when I plug the flash drive in, the TV switches to that USB port, and it has provisions for a slide show with timing and such. There's been something like that on every TV I've used in recent memory.

The memory stick is the next best thing, and useful, but what is the best way of connecting the computer and the TV? If any.

HDMI is the new standard and, as you say, your TV has 4 HDMI inputs. You will need an adapter from the video out on your Mac to HDMI. Video ports have changed wildly over the years, so just Google you model and you can find what you need. I think mine of that era had a "Mini Display Port" and I just searched for that and got lots of hits for HDMI adapters. Or type into Amazon-- lots of choices. But double check your computer's port.

You can search system preferences for the Display module, and when you plug in the TV, it will show the TV's settings and, if your usual monitor is still connected, offer to let you use the TV side by side with your monitor or mirror what your monitor has. You may also have to play with some settings to get the prettiest picture.

Have a Merry Christmas, Peace on Earth, Good Will toward fellow creatures.

Murimac4 wrote: A harddisk is (?) the same as a USB flash drive, just bigger...

I hope to avoid cable connections, because they have to pass doors and a kitchen.

A USB-Flash (or thumb) drive is a slow, cheap, small SSD (solid state drive, not mechanical). So plugging a hard drive directly to a USB port on the TV would work, and using a drive seems ideal if you just want to look at your pictures.

The drive you plug in, though, needs to be formatted in a way that the TV and the Mac both understand, and that's probably ExFat, an old format that remains universal. You wouldn't want to use a hard drive that you often use with your computer-- A Mac's external drive should be Mac formatted and it would have lots of files on it that the TV might find confusing. You should use a freshly formatted drive dedicated to the TV.

I'd buy a USB-Flash drive just for this-- the last ones I bought were about $5 each for 32 GB-- that's maybe 30 thousand pictures each. If your pictures are in Photos, then just Export them directly to the flash drive.

There may be a bunch of "invisible" files that appear to the TV that the Mac doesn't see. If that's a problem, there is a way to get rid of them.

I use an older Mac (2014 maybe) connected to my TV as my "Apple TV" or "Amazon Firestick" to run streaming services. I bought an adapter from Amazon to connect the display port to an HDMI cable that's plugged in to the HDMI port on the TV. Rather than relying on my home WiFi, I got an Ethernet adapter (from Amazon, of course) and connect it directly to the router.

Often, to run a slide show on the TV, I export pictures from Photos to a USB flash drive, and the TV has USB ports and will run a slide show off it.

So it depends a lot on what ports are available on your TV. What does it have?