Photos missing from menu on AppleTV

Sadly nothing has changed and I am getting used to it, I realize this should not be as it is but I have been using other methods to view photo's.

All this began prior to OS X 10.10 and it still remains today. What I use (with limited ease) is a selection of iCloud based "playlists" to share photo's that can be viewed using the "iCloud Photos" method. It's not automatic as the regular Photos list menu item from the Apple TV < Computers Menu item, since you have to select and have the presence of mind to choose and Share to iCloud Albums. I have also noticed the Apple TV's speed is slow to display any content photo related, music, movies ... are fine.

As clumbsy as the iCloud Albums are for viewing general photos it has a side benefit of appearing on iPhones and iPads but not on a large format of a big screen TV.

Again and still nothing has changed and I am getting used to it, I have purchased a nice printer to show / display favorites.

The most current OS's are not helpful but a glimmer of hope in the newest iTunes has a 'home sharing' option to allow the Photo's item to appear on the TV under the Computers item.

This a welcome change but it still does nothing, my excitement seeing the Photos symbol on the 3g TV and the clown fish on 2g TV was dashed by never seeing any images. The spinning 'ball of death' has never stopped, it might stop one day.

Something that comes to mind, would sharing my entire photo library to the cloud speed things up? I do not want to take-on an expense of additional Cloud storage just to see a few images that seem to work (albeit very slow) over a few photo streams of selected images.

Going forward with a decision to migrate to another step in Cloud storage (remembering the utter disaster of contacts in the cloud) will be the stuff of lore for generations around the campfire. Knowing this, should the expense of Cloud storage and pending disaster of many years of images, lost named faces, lost places, lost notes and all the other organizational disasters related to iPhoto and now Photos, I shall ask family to kick me if I think this way again to try and see if this will work.

As I reiterate, clumbsy as the iCloud Albums are for viewing general photos it has a side benefit of appearing on iPhones and iPads but not on a large format of a big screen TV. The Photo stream(s) on all TV's is poorly organized by a yet unknown manner, I thought it was by date or perhaps clock hour but I was wrong. I have circumvented this by taking my 50K+ collection of images and created several streams to narrow the search thus avoiding any time wasted looking for a search that does not exist.

There was a glimmer of hope today, shortly after I wrote above (about 1 ½ hours) the photos appeared.

Went out for dinner.

Came back and started everything back up as I normally do - Nothing. Checked and unchecked and rechecked settings, stood on one foot - Nothing.

Frankly it all started to a limited degree just before Mavericks era and has continued. During this time I have become complacent with photos not working on any TV (before Yosemite perhaps monthly) however since several iPads came into our possession these have been my goto for images. The preferred method is of course several photo streams shared and not shared which work with acceptable results. Shared photo streams work to a certain level on any TV but certainly not quickly.

May I also add screen savers on TV's & iMac will default to National Geographic often and impossible to predict intervals - I'm beginning to Hate National Geographic. On my iMac I found the folder of images and replaced it with a single image warning me Yosemite has failed once again. I see this image weekly.

I can be reasonable confident the issues are not TV related nor internal network related, the root problem is OS X and the apps iPhoto and now Photos. Serving up content on all devices is instantaneous with a sustained data rate well above normal, except for images and only images.

To address your ponderation of external storage, no, I have heard of horror stories using external drives for photos. Music, Video, TV... are all on external drives (7TB) & backed up to another set of drives. Time capsule is happy looking after images and documents. My thoughts on the iCloud image storage was speaking aloud of perhaps a notion OS X might feel better or work better that I'm not aware, perhaps as well sparking a thought that photo library iCloud storage has a benefit. I will let Apple know of my situation and prepare myself to reinstall everything which I would like to avoid, I would have thought Photos might be fundamentally new but it appears it is using some remnant of iPhoto.