Need ATV3 help with streaming Photos

I'm trying out a ATV3 at my house that I want to give to my 80 year old mother to stream photos from her PC computer... she has an iPhone and iPad. I started a thread awhile back asking for help deciding which media streamer would be the easiest for her to use and a couple suggested a ATV3 but I'm having trouble streaming photos. When I click on Computer and Photos it loads the pictures but it takes forever to even load one picture but after it does load and I go back to it later it will come up immediately. I have an Oppo 93 and photos come up really quick so I don't think it's a network thing I'm using a wired connection.

I'm assuming if working correctly the ATV3 should populate photos quickly like my Oppo otherwise it wouldn't be so highly recommended for local media.

In case I don't have the ATV setup right here is what I've done.
1. Turned on Home Sharing for my Network
2. Turned on Home Sharing in iTunes
3. Chose Photos to share in iTunes
4. iTunes is running
5. I even tried Factory Restore and reinstalling the software but it didn't help and like I said I can stream photos with my Oppo 93 fine
6. I'm streaming folders from my Pictures Library and there's anywhere from two pictures in a folder to a 100
7. I don't have any trouble streaming Music but could be because I use iTunes Match

I borrowed her iPad just to try out AirPlay/Mirroring and both work great but unless I get the Photo streaming figured I'm going to return the ATV3. I don't have a iPhone or iPad myself so it's possible I don't fully understand everything but been doing a lot of reading. Any suggestions?




Mike

I built a PC over last Xmas which uses an Intel i5-2500K and 16GB of RAM so it's fairly fast and I don't think it's a firewall issue because it makes no difference whether it's on or off.

Been playing with wireless this afternoon and can't tell a difference still takes a long time to load a picture or folder I have about 30 folders I have ATV3 trying to stream.

When I click on Computers > Photos today is the first time it's actually shown the album cover (first picture in folder) of all my folders but at the same it won't always load the pictures inside the folder. If it does happen to display all the pictures inside a folder if I click on a specific picture it could take a minute to load or never.

Another strange behavior I don't get is if I scroll down my list of folders and leave a folder highlighted it will eventually go into it's animated cover art thing showing the pictures inside the folder but if I actually go inside that folder none are displayed and they may or may not load. Why does it do this?

From ATV3's Home screen I have noticed that if I click on "Music" it pulls from iTunes Match and loads really fast but if I click on Computers > Music it pulls from my Library on my computer and is not nearly as fast but it does load unlike some of my pictures.

Since ATV3 is working so slow for me could someone explain how it's supposed to work? Like after you click on Computer > Photos and click on a particular folder are your photos supposed to immediately populate? Can you easily run a slideshow?

Not sure what you mean by form playlists since I'm trying to get it to play folders? Like I said if I scroll down the folder's list the Cover Art animation works great showing every picture within the folder it's just when I click on a individual folder and then slideshow, or individual photo it can't load the pictures.

Sure would like to get this to work because I really like the simple GUI of ATV.

Let me come at displaying photos from a different angle I messed around using Photo Stream and I've been able to load individual photos from my PC into Photo stream and they show up in ATV. The thing I can't figure out is a way to load entire folders so everything is organized can't you do this with Photo Stream?

Philip with Windows/iTunes I have it selected to look at my "Pictures" folder and then selected individual folders to share. When I start ATV3 it looks for my iTunes Shared Library and then lists all the folders I selected (appearing vertically) under Computers > Mike's Library > Photos. So my next option under Photos is to select either Photos which I guess might be a playlist but it never loads anything, or select individual folders which load very slow. Since this isn't my iPad I've not synced it to my iTunes so don't know if that would make a difference or not.

I did get a reply on the Apple Support forum why I can't add entire Photo folders to Photo Stream and it's because IOS 5 doesn't support it but that IOS 6 would... I hope he's right because in researching IOS 6 I've never seen it mentioned.

I think I'm going to have to rely on Photo Stream for viewing pictures on my ATV3 just wish it wasn't limited to storing 1000 at a time they really need a Photo version of iTunes Match.



Mike