iCloud Photos on Apple TV

[Gator5000e]

If I turn on iCloud Photos on my ATV, will that turn on iCloud Photos for all my devices, or just the ATV? I don’t use iCloud Photos on anything else and really don’t want to use it, so that leads me to the question.

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

[w5jck]

Okay I’m confused by your statement, “I don’t use iCloud Photos on anything else and really don’t want to use it.” If you don’t use iCloud Photos on any other device, then you won’t have photos to share via iCloud Photos on your ATV. So I’m not sure why you would even want to enable it on the ATV, unless you want to stare at a blank screen.

To answer your question though, if you turn it on for the ATV it only enables it on your ATV. You have to specifically turn it on (or off) on each device before it works (or stops working) on those devices. But again, the ATV doesn’t take photos, so to view iCloud Photos on your ATV you will need to have a device that does take photos and enable iCloud Photos on that device in order to share them with the ATV.

 

[Starfia]

Okay I’m confused by your statement, “I don’t use iCloud Photos on anything else and really don’t want to use it.” If you don’t use iCloud Photos on any other device, then you won’t have photos to share via iCloud Photos on your ATV. So I’m not sure why you would even want to enable it on the ATV, unless you want to stare at a blank screen.

w5jck and Gator – that's what I'd always thought, but I went ahead and tried it, and it looks like it's more complicated than that.

On the current versions of macOS, iOS and iPadOS, turning on "iCloud Photos" is equivalent to turning on what was previously called "iCloud Photo Library," meaning your entire library is uploaded, stored and synced using iCloud, and not necessarily stored at full quality on your devices. However, there have always been other features that use iCloud, such as My Photo Stream and Shared Albums, and it's always been possible to have those features switched on independently.

But the Photos app on the Apple TV doesn't offer individual toggles for each of those features – just "Turn on iCloud Photos," which I imagine is what inspired the question. (I'd also never turned it on specifically because I thought "I don't want that – iCloud Photos is the one iCloud-related Photos feature I don't want to use.")

It turns out that selecting "Turn on iCloud Photos" on the Apple TV enables access to four tabs: "Memories," "Shared," "Albums," and "Library." Most are indeed unpopulated if you're not using iCloud Photos on any other device. However, if you're using Shared Albums on your other devices that aren't using iCloud Photos, the "Shared" tab does indeed display those albums. It also lets you play them as slide shows and set them as the Apple TV's screen saver.

My evaluation would be that the wording in the Apple TV's Photos app is misleading, and "Turn on iCloud Photos" should be interpreted to read something more like "Enable iCloud Features for Photos" with some elaboration on how that works. So I think that was a totally reasonable question, and thank you for spurring me to finally start using something I would have enjoyed using all this time.

 

[priitv8]

Apple TV user guide contains also some useful information on that topic:

‎Apple TV User Guide

‎Computing & Internet · 2021

books.apple.com

 

[Gator5000e]

Thank you

w5jck and Gator – that's what I'd always thought, but I went ahead and tried it, and it looks like it's more complicated than that.

On the current versions of macOS, iOS and iPadOS, turning on "iCloud Photos" is equivalent to turning on what was previously called "iCloud Photo Library," meaning your entire library is uploaded, stored and synced using iCloud, and not necessarily stored at full quality on your devices. However, there have always been other features that use iCloud, such as My Photo Stream and Shared Albums, and it's always been possible to have those features switched on independently.

But the Photos app on the Apple TV doesn't offer individual toggles for each of those features – just "Turn on iCloud Photos," which I imagine is what inspired the question. (I'd also never turned it on specifically because I thought "I don't want that – iCloud Photos is the one iCloud-related Photos feature I don't want to use.")

It turns out that selecting "Turn on iCloud Photos" on the Apple TV enables access to four tabs: "Memories," "Shared," "Albums," and "Library." Most are indeed unpopulated if you're not using iCloud Photos on any other device. However, if you're using Shared Albums on your other devices that aren't using iCloud Photos, the "Shared" tab does indeed display those albums. It also lets you play them as slide shows and set them as the Apple TV's screen saver.

My evaluation would be that the wording in the Apple TV's Photos app is misleading, and "Turn on iCloud Photos" should be interpreted to read something more like "Enable iCloud Features for Photos" with some elaboration on how that works. So I think that was a totally reasonable question, and thank you for spurring me to finally start using something I would have enjoyed using all this time.

Thank you for this. When I went to the Photos app on the ATV, I believe the language said turn on iClpud Photos to view your "recent" and other photos. Since I have an album on my other devices called "Recent" I thought that it might show those. But I do not want to use iCloud Photos for everything, thus my hesitation. But you have cleared this up for me, Starfia. Thanks again.

 

[w5jck]

Bottom line is that if you want to view the Recent album, or any other album, of photos from one of your Apple devices on your ATV, then you have to use iCloud. The only other, but clunky way, is to use Airplay and push the other devices screen onto the ATV.