Apple TV2 Photo Sharing FAIL

Previously chronicled issues streaming video to my Apple TV (2nd generation). Decided to setup sharing a portion of my iPhoto library to it and the subject line says it all. Apple TV is running the latest update as of this writing (4.4). The objective was really simple: I just want to view the photos stored on my computer on the flatscreen TV.

I first enabled sharing of selected albums in iPhoto (9.2 as of this writing). The total number of photos in those albums would be just under 10,000 (since according to those who have run into problems, noted it has problems when there are over 20,000). From the Apple TV, I selected Computers -> iTunes media -> Photos -> Albums. Seemed simple enough except when I navigated into various events, most of the photos had no thumbnails (just the default) so clicking on those only invoked the now infamous spinner. As usual, am not alone (there are of course more than these 3 threads).

Unsurprisingly, it is due to the way it is designed to work since it seems to be trying to transfer these photos to the 8GB of flash storage on the device, after which it is likely rebuilding the thumbnails.  Whichever way you look at it, that is going to be a slow process.  Note that from a marketing perspective, the device has no storage but the reality there is some for iOS and buffering purposes. Simply put, it’s a storage and RAM limitation issue. This could be alleviated if Apple would just allow these photos to be streamed since wasn’t this device meant to be a streaming one anyway? I can see storing some photos for the screensaver but not for users’ photo libraries (which any software designer worth their salt would have a clue that there will be more than a handful of users out there with a couple of thousand images)? I mean, I can load the Photos app from my non-tv iOS devices and use AirPlay (streaming) to display the photos on the Apple TV without issues like missing photos or lengthy delays.

Yet, Apple provides no way to stream photos from the device and only allows photo sharing via Home Sharing (which again, tries to sync whatever it can fit).  And because of the limitations involved via this design and the resulting hoop jumping required, this defeats the purpose of one of the key features of the Apple TV since I’m not able to easily and simply access my entire iPhoto’s library that resides on my computer, and view them ALL on the television. If the lag and delays weren’t as long as they are,  then it would be tolerable.  Having to wait 10 minutes to have thumbnails show up is unacceptable.

Hobby or not, some of this stuff just seems so obvious but it begs the question as to the actual hardware AND software QA process as far as defining, and then testing various scenarios.  Remember, Apple controls the entire widget (software and hardware) so features should for the most part, just work.  I can obviously stream content residing on my non-tv iOS devices to Apple TV.  iTunes video media being shared via Home Sharing is actually streamed to Apple TV when being played so bandwidth isn’t the issue. Hell, I can view photos albums stored on Flickr faster than the ones from my iPhoto library which is sitting on a computer not even 10 feet away from the Apple TV.  Maybe the engineers in charge of the tv2 don’t shoot a lot of photos like most people do.  Most likely is maybe this thing just has not been QA’d properly.

The device has promise but before it can really tackle the living room (and be successful), it needs a major redesign at the user interface level because the overall user experience of getting media to just simply work is turning out to be a dismal failure and un-Apple like.