Apple TV (2nd Gen) screensaver photo shuffle

From another post:

Unlike photo slideshows, the screensaver uses photographs stored on the Apple TV. The Apple TV has little storage and therefore the screensaver selection is limited to a selected number of photographs. There is no way to determine what these photographs are, other than to create smaller albums and choose them for the screensaver.

It's not a bug, it's the way it's supposed to work, if it allowed you to fill the Apple TV with photos there would be no room to download videos.

Sorry. I disagree with this. I understand your theory however since the Apple TV is connected to the mac there is zero reason why it can't pull random photos from the macs hard drive it doesn't need to store all of the photos on the Apple TV.

This is just currently a poor implementation.

I agree it should be able to stream the photos, but it is not..I have the ATV hooked up to a switch and after I pick the folder and watch it load the library the lights on the switch stop..So the ATV is definatley not loadinf anymore photos than whatever the buffer limit is..Its just by design and no one knows why it was not designed to stream the photos.

So do you think that when you play music through ATV it has to save the songs to ATV before playing them? Of course not; it streams them through iTunes.

The whole point of this discussion threadi s that ATV is *not* designed to stream photos and it should be. It's a design flaw that can be fixed with a software patch that Apple has refused to provide despite thousands of pleas from this forum.

It is, in fact, a bug.

Yeah, this is a disappointment. The feature has so much potential, but if it doesn't clear and refresh every ten minutes or so, it's completely pointless. I have 26K+ photos and I'm seeing about 200 on repeat.

It's weird because I see the what I feel are new photos coming up regularly, but it also seems to latch on to certain photos and just show them over and over again.

I wish Apple would just explain how it's supposed to work, but the official documentation is so sparse (because this great product is so easy to use, of course).

NBB

My understanding is that restarting iTunes will generate a new random selection of pictures, but that you will still only cycle through a limited subset.

thanks for the tip!

I am hoping (though probably in vain) that the new itunes 11, due for release over the next few days could fix this ?

you never know....

It would be great if iTunes 11 fixes it, but I think the fix will need to be on the Apple TV side.

There was a popular rumor a few months ago that ATV would be updated to support running Apps. I thinik if that environment is introduced the problem will go away as soon as a developer creates an app specifically designed to fix this issue.

This thread made me realize that of the 7,000 photos in my iPhoto album designated as the source for Apple TV streaming, I keep on seeing only a few hundred of them in regular rotation, and nothing recent at all. Hopefully there will be fix for this someday.

glad to see others (many others) are as frustrated as I am with this crappy implementation. I've been perplexed on what I was doing wrong and why photos weren't updating accordingly - Apple please fix

I have the same problem as everyone else with my ATV v3. The primary reason I purchased it was to transform a my flatpanel tv into digital photo frame. I have thousands of photos in my Aperture library, and only a couple hundred of them are displayed by the screensaver. When I selected "Aperture Photo Library" as the screensaver, I expect to get the entire Aperture Photo Library.

The Apple TV software needs to be updated to stream photos from the computer's iTunes Library instead of caching a small subset.

It would be OK to revert to cache if the iTunes stream isn't available, but it should switch back to streaming the entire library when when it is.

Would getting an Apple TV Gen 1 solve the problem? Will it allow my to sync my entire library and use it as a screen saver, served from its internal hard drive? My primary purpose is to display my photos.

Yes. You'll give up things like AirPlay, but you'll get the proper screensaver back.

I posted this below back in July 2011. I know it's not optimal but does this work for anyone else?

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"This whole issue is annoying at best. As some have said iCloud will likely fix this but from what I have heard is that iCloud will be limited to 1000 photos? Anyway, a current workaround is to go into Photos under Computer on the ATV, make sure you click on "Photos" selected and then click "Slideshow" in top left. I have been doing this for a while and it seems to be all the photos (I have 20,000+) and will shuffle them if you select "Shuffle" under Slideshow settings and set "Repeat Photos" to off. One problem with this option is that if you want to change an Internet radio station you need to exit and then go back and restart the slideshow. But it works for when the grandparents are here."