AppleTV pictures and iCloud

I used to envy Apple users. Thinking that they were the Bee's knees of the computer world. But now I have to say that I am glad I have never bought one.

We have a Windows 8 laptop, an iPad2. To go with it I bought dad an AppleTV.

The link between them is supposed to be the iCloud, but it isn't.

The AppleTV is almost useless, the only thing that can be seen on it are new iTune purchases (nothing from before he had the AppleTV). But the only pictures are from 'Shares', things that have been shared by email. To view any other images we would have to write an email sharing all of his pictures. I havenot tried this, because I am not sure it is the right way to do it.

iPad, a tiny number of pictures has gone on it automatically, 5. Plus those that a sister has sent as a share by email. But nothing else, there does not seem to be a way to get pictures onto the iCloud. We paid for extra iCloud storage because we were told if there wasn't enough room it would not work. That did not help. I have also been told that if I pay for some extra in iTunes all of the music will be put on the iCloud, I am reluctent to pay more because what I have paid for so far does not work.

I did sync the pictures through iTunes once directly to the iPad. But we were still trying to get them into the cloud in the hopes of putting them onto the AppleTV. We followed the instructions and came to the message "To share from the cloud the pictures will be deleted off the iPad'. I went off to read a few more Apple support pages before I pressed the continue button. It spent a long time deleting them so we thought it must be copyng them to iCloud. It didn't copy them anywhere, just deleted them, 1,400 pictures gone, luckily the PC and iPad don't talk to each other so I still have the PC copies.. Now iTunes refuses to copy the pictures again, it says 'Cloud sharing is enables' and gives no options. I have tried to switch off cloud sharing on the PC and the iPad, but it does not change.

So, I bought an external memory stick adaptor, from Apple, I copied all of his pictures onto a 32G memory stick, plugged it into the iPad and it says "This device is not supported". So, more money wasted.

The iCloud does nothing, the PC and iPad do not work together, and the AppleTV does not do what it says it does in the Apple TV adverts.

How do I go about getting my money back, because the support pages are not helping and I have no idea how to get this lot working.