Screen Saver Lost Home Sharing

In tvOS27 I also found the Home Sharing screensaver no longer working but I found a workaround.

If you select the computer icon and then the Media Library window you are presented with the following five options - Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos, Now Playing. If you play your chosen music as before and navigate back to this screen and choose Photos you will be able to select from Photos or Albums.

You are now presented with thumbnails of your images and the ability to 'Play Slideshow'. Selecting this gives you the settings for the slideshow - I recommend having Shuffle and Repeat 'On'. Now press "Start Slideshow' and you should get your images playing while your music is playing.

I doubt the new hardware will have a different os. Our choice to stream our screensaver from our hard drive was consciously taken away - I dont see it coming back. I have been airplaying music from my iPhone, and using the slide show mode to show my photos. It is more work, but since I need to set up the slide show every time, I do tend to rotate the photos folders more often.

I figured it out. On your iMac:

1. Open the Photos app.
2. Select the photos you want to use on your Apple TV.
3. Click Share → Shared Albums → New Shared Album.
4. Give the album a name (for example, Apple TV Screensaver).
5. Create the Shared Album. You do not need to enable iCloud Photos or upload your entire library.

On your Apple TV 4K:

1. Make sure it is signed in with the same Apple Account as your iMac.
2. Open Settings → Profiles and Accounts → your profile → Photos.
3. Turn Shared Albums ON.
4. Open the Photos app and select your Shared Album.
5. Set that album as your screensaver through the Apple TV screensaver settings.

I ran across the same issue after upgrading to 27 and i also have no interest in iCloud Photos. Home sharing option is a great way to have access to photos stored on my mac mini. I disabled automatic system upgrades on my other apple tv but dont know how long before tvOS 26 stops working.

OS 27:

OS 26:

[Edited by Moderator]

Apple is turning the screensaver in TVOS27 into a marketing tool instead of a customer feature. They want to show off their own products and aerials, etc.

Taking away Home Sharing access in screensaver has just crippled the main feature I use heavily. I want to curate and display my own photos!

Has anyone found a third party screensaver App?

Apple has lost its early focus on providing great features for customers - it now just tells us how great they and their products are.

I struggled a for a while to get the feature working until I searched the web and found this thread. This is a sad day, I use this feature since my first Apple TV. I hope they return the feature as I will not be putting years of photos on shared albums. I use to use the smart album feature that allows me to see the last three months of photos updating automatically on my MacBook and auto refresh on the Apple TV screensaver. This feel like a money grab to increase my subscription with iCloud. SMH

I just ran into the same issue, and I’m more than a little perturbed about it. I’m simply not going to use iCloud Photos, so this has soured me on Apple TV ownership in general (and I’ve owned every version since the very first one, and currently have four running in my home).

Until today, this was a primary use case for my Apple TV, and they’ve just killed it.

I dont want to upload 10,000 photos to iCloud and start paying outrageous storage fees, when they are on Mac Studio and Dropbox. My main use of the Apple TV is to listen to music (from a library on my Mac Studio - not Apple Music or iCloud) and use one of my many saved albums as a screensaver. I hate the built in screensavers on the TV - I want to see MY photography.

If the OS lets me play the albums as a slide show, why cant I choose the same photos as my screen saver?

I am extremely disappointed that I allowed my Apple TV to update. For now, I have set screen saver to never come on, and will have to select a slide show to start each time I listen to music.

This may be the change that breaks my all-Apple choice, **** it. I was willing to pay the premium for their hardware as long as the software offered mostly effortless integration of the things I used. Not now.

I wonder if their next move is to disable home media sharing altogether?

I won’t move to iCloud for my media. I’ll just choose some other inelegant solution that still uses my personal library and local storage.

Yep, I’m doing the same. It does better than the old screensaver since it appears to cycle through the entire album rather than just the buffer, but it is not nearly as convenient. That convenience was part of the Apple magic — it just works together. In that vein, this was a tactical error that works against the brand rather than leveraging it by improving the screensaver’s use through home sharing.

The reason I bought a new Apple TV (my 7th one), 10 months ago, was to continue streaming my photos from my iMac (2TB), but now in 4K. Now I cannot do this any more since TVOS 27. Can I return my Apple TV that is under warranty?