Apple TV Home Sharing Photo Screen Saver Behavior - Randomly Not Showing All Photos

[MikeElmendorf]

I've had this problem several times with all three of my Apple TVs (from across the generations) and am now having it again with my Apple TV 4K over the last few days:

I have a folder set up on my Mac with about 10,000 photos, connected to the Apple TVs via Home Sharing to feed the screen saver. Usually it works great. Sometimes, however, it will revert to displaying a random selection of just a relatively small selection of the photos in that directory, usually from a similar time period. Typically it has been older photos; this time, it is selection from the most recent.

Oddly, when this happens, it will typically just be on one of the Apple TV units; the others will randomly display correctly.

I've talked to Apple about this numerous times--and it is a thread found in their support forums too. They seem to have little understanding of how this is actually supposed to work.

Previously, I got it to re-sync with the Home Sharing folder by signing out and back into iCloud on the Apple TV. That does not seem to have worked this time. I've tried turning Home Sharing off and on at both ends as well.

Any ideas here? And any clear understanding of how this is supposed to work? Obviously, the Apple TV isn't going to load all the photos and it does cache them in the shared directory in some ways (I've deleted that too, as in the past, to try to force it to fully re-sync).

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[pkcable]

You have already done everything that I would suggest. Sounds like this might be some sort of bug or glitch. The only thing left to try would be to factory reset one or both devices. I would start with the Apple TV, if that does not fix it then you could try factory resetting the Mac. HOWEVER, personally I might just live with the glitch/bug, rather than resetting the Mac.