Why is it not possible to show photos in alphabetical order?

lexvo said:

. . .
Finally: if anyone has an easy workaround for this problem (not involving iPhoto as I don't use this) I'm happy to hear

Click to expand...

There's your problem.



Nah, just kidding. Here's my real advice
. . .
Use Aperture.

lexvo said:

Every time I going to show photos with my AppleTV I wonder in what order they will come out. Why is it not possible to show them in order of the file name? Most of the time I reshuffle my photos a bit, but on the ATV they are almost always sorted in order of date taken (this is a sort fixed default I think). Sometimes I manage to get them in my order

I know (and saw) that this question was risen several times before. But still, how hard could it be to implement a 'sort by file name' option?

A workaround is to edit the EXIF. But:
1) this shouldn't be necessary
2) is not always a reliable method

Sorry for the rant but this, in combination with the ever returning "this library has no content" error, makes the ATV the only Apple device I regret buying.

Finally: if anyone has an easy workaround for this problem (not involving iPhoto as I don't use this) I'm happy to hear

Click to expand...

Use iPhoto. It keeps your photo albums in alphabetical order.

I found a fix to photo ordering

There are so many potential influences of this problem that it would be a major research project to find the precise reason. In summary, I found that by turning on each folder in iTunes home sharing one at a time, all the photos were in date order on my ATV2. However ...

I reached this point after many unsuccessful operations which may in the end have made their contribution. Firstly, you have to allow for the possibility that ATV and/or iTunes is keeping a thumbnail database (this is obvious when ATV doesn't take any time to display a page of thumbnails despite the fact that you moved photos between folders, turned folders off/on, etc), so I took extreme measures between each attempt:

1. Stop iTunes.
2. Power-off ATV
2. Delete the ATV photo cache database in the root folder of photos.
3. Make the changes you hope will fix it.
4. Restart iTunes.
5. Restart ATV

Obviously you will have to do this at least once, but here are the final conditions I arrived at:

6. My folders were newly created before copying the files into them.
7. My photo filenames were in alphabetical order according to their date.
8. They were copied into the folders one at a time in alpha/date order, so the physical order = alpha order = date order.
9. The folders were turned on in iTunes home sharing one at a time.

OK, I wrote some Perl to perform steps 7 & 8, which (who knows) may have been unnecessary. Please let us all know if you find a shortcut, but BEWARE - many solutions appear to work when in reality they were merely co-incidental. This one survives through the night when all is powered down.