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Apple TV Tip #3
One of the nice features of the Apple TV is to display slideshows of your digital pictures on your large screen TV. The Apple TV even has a really cool screen saver built-in that shows many of your own digital shots. The one feature that Apple TV lacks, at least in the version 1.0 software is the ability to “stream” these pictures from your Windows PC or Mac. These pictures unfortunately need to first be “synced” to the Apple TV first to display them. I hope that Apple changes this in a later software update.
Pictures from your iPhoto library (Mac with iPhoto 4.03 or higher) or Adobe Photoshop Album or Elements (Windows) can be viewed on the Apple TV. For now you need to get these images onto the Apple TV hard drive to view them. I highly recommend this as it will really personalize your Apple TV.
Here’s how:
You need to set the Apple TV to sync your iPhoto (Mac), Adobe Photoshop Album (Windows) or Elements (Windows) pictures from within iTunes. This can only be done on the main host computer that you have chosen to sync with the Apple TV in the original set up (of course this can be changed if needed).
Select the Apple TV in the “Devices” section in the left hand column in iTunes. Now you will need to configure what you want to “sync” with the Apple TV. The advantages of syncing movies, TV Shows, music, music videos, or audiobooks is that you can access these on your TV even when the main host computer is turned off or not sharing iTunes. This media can always be “streamed” to your TV with the Apple TV without the need to be stored locally on the Apple TV’s internal hard drive.
In order to view your digital pictures, you need to sync with the Apple TV to see them. Unlike the other media in iTunes that can always be streamed without syncing. It may be worth mentioning that the Apple TV only has a 40GB internal hard drive at this time and may not be large enough to hold all your media if you have a lot of stuff. So for some users with a lot of media, some planning may have to take place.
Syncing Order
One of the first things you may need to become aware of is that the Apple TV has a specific order it uses when syncing with iTunes.
Apple TV syncs your media files in the following order Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, then Photos. This can be important as the Apple TV internal hard drive can get filled up fast, before you get any photos on it. Since Photos need to be synced to be viewed some choices need to be made to fit Photos on the Apple TV.
This is pretty easy and done within iTunes. Since all this other media can be streamed it may be more useful to limit the amount of video and audio media to allow for more room for photos.
Movie Sync Settings – allow you to choose specific movies or a number of recent unwatched movies
TV Shows Sync Settings – allows you to choose which shows you want on your Apple TV’s hard drive.
Music Sync Settings – You can select specific playlists. If you want to have music in your slideshows on the Apple TV, make sure to make a playlist of tracks for this. Audiobooks and Music Videos are also added here.
Podcast Sync Settings – decide if you want them on your Apple TV.
Photo Sync Settings – here you decide which albums you want to be able to view on the Apple TV.
Once you have selected what media to sync with the Apple TV depending on the amount of media and the speed of your home network, the actual sync may take awhile.
I selected to add many of my favorite photo albums to the Apple TV. Since Movies, TV Shows, and Podcasts can always be streamed I wanted to fill more of the internal hard drive of the Apple TV with photos.
Remember: It order to “stream” media your computer needs to be on and iTunes has to be open and sharing.
Viewing Photos
Once the sync is finished you will see that the Apple TV will replace YOUR photos with the built-in ones for the very nice default screen saver. You can chose wether to display this screen saver during music playback or not in the Apple TV screen saver settings.
To view your photos on the Apple TV you need to select Apple TV in the “Sources” menu, then select Photos. You then will be able to select the Albums that you selected to sync to the Apple TV.
Under “Slideshow Settings” you can decide on various options for your slideshow, Time Per Slide, Music, Repeat or not, Shuffle Photos, Shuffle Music, Use the Ken Burns panning effect, and transitions.
Note: Slideshow settings in iPhoto do not carry over to the Apple TV, only albums. Also you must have the tracks you want to use in the Slideshows you create stored on the Apple TV hard drive (via syncing with iTunes) to use music.
