Sharing iPhoto albums with AppleTV... long delay?

[zerodb]

I'm a bit of an ATV noob, the only time I spend with one is trying to set things up for my boss. She's a professional photographer and currently manages almost a terabyte of photos in RAW format using Adobe Bridge (they're all on an esata RAID setup but that's not particularly important).

She's got an ATV and a lovely 50-some inch Samsung LCD which she would like to be able to use to show photos off from time to time.

The logical solution as far as I was concerned was to take her selections for a slide show from Bridge, drag them into iPhoto (had to upgrade her to 09, she was on iPhoto 5 which doesn't play nicely with NEF files). I've got her set up through iPhoto and iTunes to share her entire photo library. This works alright except for one thing...

When she builds a new Album in iPhoto it takes sometimes an hour or more before that new album shows up on the ATV. Is this normal? She's thoroughly annoyed because she would like this to be a dynamic solution where she can create slideshows on the fly, but if she has to sit around and re-check the ATV every 10 minutes until it works, she's just never going to use it.

 

[tom1971]

Did you check the network speed ? Sounds more like a network problem to me.

 

[zerodb]

Did you check the network speed ? Sounds more like a network problem to me.

Everything is wireless-N, Airport Express router running the show here (strong signal on both devices) and she's streaming from her Macbook Pro. I wouldn't think it has to move much data between devices for it to SEE that an album has been shared. And once the share is detected, it works brilliantly even though the files are enormous (though I assume that the streaming method reduces the resolution on-the-fly before it sends the pictures)

 

[RumMunkey]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16)

Try hitting "Sync" on the AppleTV tab in iTunes to force it to pass a new Library XML file to the AppleTV (rather than waiting for it to go check on it's own).

Not 100% sure if this will do it, but it's worth a shot.

 

[zerodb]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16)

Try hitting "Sync" on the AppleTV tab in iTunes to force it to pass a new Library XML file to the AppleTV (rather than waiting for it to go check on it's own).

Not 100% sure if this will do it, but it's worth a shot.

I'll give this a try. I wonder if I could script this with Automator if it works.

 

[zerodb]

Update to the above - there's no "sync" button when I'm streaming my library.

But in the process of looking for it, I discovered the following:

I've found a flawless way to make the ATV's streaming library update with new photo albums, but it doesn't make much sense.

If I import / rename / create / add to / delete any albums, I must then:

Quit iPhoto
Click on iTunes (bring to foreground)

Then within 10-12 seconds WITHOUT FAIL the change is reflected, the list on the TV will even redraw spontaneously to show my new or changed albums.

If I don't quit iPhoto I can sit there for an hour and nothing happens, whether or not I mess with iTunes.

But it seems really REALLY silly that users have to go through this kind of contortion to accomplish a very simple (and I would imagine very COMMON) task with photo sharing.

 

[eddyg]

Update to the above - there's no "sync" button when I'm streaming my library.

Not in iTunes, when you select the AppleTV, bottom right? Or right click AppleTV in iTunes and select Sync?

Cheers, Ed.

 

[zerodb]

Not in iTunes, when you select the AppleTV, bottom right? Or right click AppleTV in iTunes and select Sync?

Cheers, Ed.

As I understand it, there are two possible connections - a Sync connection actually dumps your files into the AppleTV's hard drive and a streaming connection only shares them as needed. When I look at the AppleTV in iTunes, it only gives me the Photos tab (with the selections of what photos to share) and two buttons on the bottom right - "cancel" and "apply" - no "sync" anywhere to be seen, so I assume that's how she's got it set up (and it makes more sense for what she's using it for anyway - she can't move 650 gigs of photos onto the appleTV even if she wanted to).

 

[tom1971]

you can attach an external HD to the aTV and use it with iTunes, so the syncing would work

 

[zerodb]

you can attach an external HD to the aTV and use it with iTunes, so the syncing would work

Yeah, I know that's a possibility but let's just pretend my boss doesn't want to maintain two copies of all of her files and keep an extra terabyte of storage tucked under her TV just because the streaming connection doesn't update quickly enough. Not to mention how long it would take for her to sync all of those photos over her wireless network.

 

[Mr Kram]

it is my impression that you cannot stream photos to the atv. this is the only thing that you cannot stream. if you create a new album in iphoto which contains new pictures it needs to sync the new photos. if you click sync or apply from within itunes, the new album should become available although all the picture will not be there until they sync to the atv.

 

[zerodb]

it is my impression that you cannot stream photos to the atv. this is the only thing that you cannot stream. if you create a new album in iphoto which contains new pictures it needs to sync the new photos. if you click sync or apply from within itunes, the new album should become available although all the picture will not be there until they sync to the atv.

See my above post to confirm that this is not true.

By the method I showed, all of the photos are available to stream within 10-15 seconds, which is clearly not enough time to have actually copied all of the files (600+ raw images) to the apple TV. Also, if I close iTunes on the host PC, all of the images become instantly unavailable. They are definitely being streamed.

It just still seems silly to me that iPhoto needs to be closed and iTunes brought into focus for it to update the list. This really seems like it should happen almost instantly without user intervention.

 

[ssh]

See my above post to confirm that this is not true.

By the method I showed, all of the photos are available to stream within 10-15 seconds, which is clearly not enough time to have actually copied all of the files (600+ raw images) to the apple TV. Also, if I close iTunes on the host PC, all of the images become instantly unavailable. They are definitely being streamed.

It just still seems silly to me that iPhoto needs to be closed and iTunes brought into focus for it to update the list. This really seems like it should happen almost instantly without user intervention.

It looks like iPhoto doesn't actually write the library updates to disk until you quite it. With iLife '09, it actually sprouts a dialog telling you that it's doing this.

BTW, thanks for the observation... I was pulling my hair out, too!