40,000+ photo library takes forever to load.

Yeah, I've found the same thing. Takes a LONG time to load the images, then as soon as you navigate somewhere else, you gotta start over. Not usable.

On the other hand, I have my screensaver setup to show images from a 100 or so image MobileMe gallery. That loads quickly and works fine. In fact, I had my network down for reconfiguring, and my AppleTV started playing the MobileMe images without network access. So it must have cached that smaller set.

So it does SOME caching of images. Just don't know how much and when.

Jim

I saw in a tear-down of an ATV 2 that it has 8Gb of flash memory, that'll be the cache. Unfortunately it seems to never update the cache for me so I get endless repetition of the same non-randomly selected group of photos.

There appears to be a hard limit of 20,000 photos. I don't know why, I'd like to see an explanination from Apple on this. I have 50,000 photos and when it finally finished the load process, which seemed to take forever, (perhaps over an hour) I had exacvtly 20,000 photos to display. Other posts have suggested the same experience at 19,998 etc. It also created a 31 MB cache file on my PC called Photo Database.
Having a hard limit, and no sub-folders is extremely disappointing.

Same issue. It's terrible.

I have approx. 50.000 pictures. When accessing all photos via Home Sharing, I assume they are sortet by date, but the first picture that shows is just from a couple of years ago, while I have 20 years worth of pictures.

When actually opening "Photos", it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to load. I don't even have that many albums, but I do have a lot of events.

And where is the GeoTag map support?

same problem here, super slow, annoying.

I have to agree. 64,000 photos sounds like an impossible dream. Im also disappointed by the lack of folders. They surely cant expect users to have just a few hundred pictures? I'm on the verge of sending my ATV2 back. Photo sharing is one of the main reasons I got it and it's rubbish to be honest.

Also in the UK the number of rentable movies is limited. So another reason to get my money back.

The only reason for keeping it is the sync with iPad and iPhone later this year. Hopefully it will redeem itself. Airplay from iTunes works well. So there is some hope.

If only there were a picasa interface, I had to setup a flickr acct last night!

Same problem. Come on guys...I did not think an issue as fundimental as this would have escaped you guys...where the testing?

Same problem and it is the single reason I bought the Apple TV. I have a library of 96k photos and we love to watch on our flat screen in the living room via an older Mac Mini. Decided to add Apple TV to the den thinking I wouldn't need to worry about buying more external hard drives and another Mac Mini for there. I wouldn't mind so much if Apple had an iPhoto setting that could randomly select certain amount of pictures and put them in an album so that each time I streamed via Apple TV I would have different pix. The closest solution I've come up with is to create some Smart Albums in iPhoto to "randomly" pick photos spread throughout the dozen or so years of photos. It isn't really random, but by creating various Smart Albums by using "Filename contains 1.j" and "Filename contains 2.j" etc I can create an album just under the 20k size limit seemingly imposed by Apple TV. This would only work if your files end in numbers and are jpegs. I'll just have to change up the 1.j to 3.j etc periodically to get a different picture set now and then. Hopefully that makes some sense and provides a bit of a solution, though not ideal, to this unwanted problem imposed by Apple TV.

How long did it take to 'load library' for 20K photos in your smart albums?

I tried to share more than one 20k album and that didn't work. So I made several different albums with 18-20K pix in them and pick only one of them to share with Apple TV at a time. It takes between 4 and 5 minutes to load. Hoping a future update will get rid of this limitation, but not optimistic.

I'm also disappointed by the lack of folders.

You are not alone! I believe they just have some issues with photo sharing from computers currently. Trying to view photos can take minutes before the "albums" actually load and show. Hopefully they can fix that up, as everything else (Music, TV, Movies) is fairly fast. Below is what I had posted elsewhere:

- -

Selecting photos from my Computer takes a considerable amount of time before anything is shown. It does eventually show the albums, but after a few mins. **

Note that I hate how Apple TV does not support sub-folders in albums. For instance I have my photos organized like this:
d:\pictures
d:\pictures\christmas
d:\pictures\christmas\2005
d:\pictures\christmas\2006
d:\pictures\disney
d:\pictures\disney\2005
d:\pictures\disney\2006

It collapses all the christmas pictures into one album. Same for disney. Wife hates this, as do I. Wish they just had a "folder" view that supported sub-folders and such. Would be awesome then! See a lot of complaints on this around the net.

Extremely slow at loading photos from a Mac, literally it takes about 6 minutes to load 500 photos, this is not good at all, my main library have about 20.000 photos and if I want to show something to a friend it will take 1 hour to "sync", any fix-update in the horizon? it just NOT works

Maybe you'll find it useful. When I wanted to connect to my iTunes Library all I could see was the spinning wheel and a message that it's loading - and that was it. What worked for me was changing the settings of the firewall on my router (NETGEAR DGN3500). I have created a new rule for inbound traffic specifically for my Apple TV (with its LAN address) - and it works perfectly. I have got around 18000 pics in my library and can see them now almost instantly.

Can you please provide more detail on the rule that you created? And does it allow sub-folder access?

I'm not much of a photographer, I find most of the pictures I take aren't worth looking at. My iPhoto library has a bit over 10,000 photos, but I only share less than 1000 to the Apple TV. I'm sure that those of you with collections of over 20,000 photos you're trying to view on the ATV are better photographers than I am and have that many "good" pictures. For you, it is a shame the ATV has an undocumented limit on the number of photos and doesn't err gracefully when that limit is exceeded. Hopefully that will get fixed.

I'm guessing most people are more like me and are reluctant to delete their photos, but realize most of them aren't very good. I use the star ratings and smart albums extensively. I rate all my pictures as I load them and am trying to go through my old albums to eventually get everything rated. I rate any picture that is bad, but I just don't want to delete it as a 1. At first I didn't assign a rating to bad pictures, but it became hard to tell which were zeroes because they were bad and which just hadn't been rated yet. Any pictures that are great are a 5, good are 4, OK 3, etc. I created a bunch of smart albums incorporating the ratings and other metadata (events, faces, places, and other tags). I only share the albums that include pictures that are 3-stars or higher to the Apple TV.

Those of you with large libraries could probably do some editing to get the photos shared to under 20K. Even if you have to combine some other metadata and to chunk the photos up to sets of less than 20K and rotate which you share depending on what you want to view. Again, I agree you shouldn't have to do so, but...

Message was edited by: SJYzer