Screen Saver Lost Home Sharing

I just ran into the same issue, and I’m more than a little perturbed about it. I’m simply not going to use iCloud Photos, so this has soured me on Apple TV ownership in general (and I’ve owned every version since the very first one, and currently have four running in my home).

Until today, this was a primary use case for my Apple TV, and they’ve just killed it.

I dont want to upload 10,000 photos to iCloud and start paying outrageous storage fees, when they are on Mac Studio and Dropbox. My main use of the Apple TV is to listen to music (from a library on my Mac Studio - not Apple Music or iCloud) and use one of my many saved albums as a screensaver. I hate the built in screensavers on the TV - I want to see MY photography.

If the OS lets me play the albums as a slide show, why cant I choose the same photos as my screen saver?

I am extremely disappointed that I allowed my Apple TV to update. For now, I have set screen saver to never come on, and will have to select a slide show to start each time I listen to music.

In tvOS27 I also found the Home Sharing screensaver no longer working but I found a workaround.

If you select the computer icon and then the Media Library window you are presented with the following five options - Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos, Now Playing. If you play your chosen music as before and navigate back to this screen and choose Photos you will be able to select from Photos or Albums.

You are now presented with thumbnails of your images and the ability to 'Play Slideshow'. Selecting this gives you the settings for the slideshow - I recommend having Shuffle and Repeat 'On'. Now press "Start Slideshow' and you should get your images playing while your music is playing.

Apple is turning the screensaver in TVOS27 into a marketing tool instead of a customer feature. They want to show off their own products and aerials, etc.

Taking away Home Sharing access in screensaver has just crippled the main feature I use heavily. I want to curate and display my own photos!

Has anyone found a third party screensaver App?

Apple has lost its early focus on providing great features for customers - it now just tells us how great they and their products are.

This may be the change that breaks my all-Apple choice, **** it. I was willing to pay the premium for their hardware as long as the software offered mostly effortless integration of the things I used. Not now.

I wonder if their next move is to disable home media sharing altogether?

I won’t move to iCloud for my media. I’ll just choose some other inelegant solution that still uses my personal library and local storage.

I found my fix, not pretty but it works. I want all my slides to show while listening to music.

1. I AirPlay music to my Sonos speaker
2. i use the Mac screensaver FLOATING and using a long HDMI cable send the video to the TV

Maybe buy the new Apple TV coming soon and see if it works better. If not, return it for a full refund. Might be a lot of returns.

I doubt the new hardware will have a different os. Our choice to stream our screensaver from our hard drive was consciously taken away - I dont see it coming back. I have been airplaying music from my iPhone, and using the slide show mode to show my photos. It is more work, but since I need to set up the slide show every time, I do tend to rotate the photos folders more often.

I’ve been an Apple TV user since the original model in 2007, when displaying an entire photo collection was simple and reliable. Nearly twenty years later, I’m astonished that Apple has managed to make this basic feature progressively worse.

After spending hours experimenting with the current screen saver, I’ve just emailed John Ternus at Apple to explain the problem and request four basic improvements:

1. Sequential display of every photograph in an album, in the selected order.
2. True shuffle, showing every photograph once before repeating.
3. The ability to resume where the screen saver left off.
4. Reliable handling of large photo albums without excessive repetition or omissions.

My wife and I spend 30–45 minutes most evenings enjoying our family photographs. I’ve now resorted to connecting my Mac directly to the television via HDMI because its Classic screen saver can accomplish what my original Apple TV did in 2007.

It’s absurd that an entire Mac is needed to perform a task that the Apple TV once handled beautifully.

I hope Apple will finally give this neglected feature some attention. I suspect there are quite a few of us who would appreciate it.

I figured it out. On your iMac:

1. Open the Photos app.
2. Select the photos you want to use on your Apple TV.
3. Click Share → Shared Albums → New Shared Album.
4. Give the album a name (for example, Apple TV Screensaver).
5. Create the Shared Album. You do not need to enable iCloud Photos or upload your entire library.

On your Apple TV 4K:

1. Make sure it is signed in with the same Apple Account as your iMac.
2. Open Settings → Profiles and Accounts → your profile → Photos.
3. Turn Shared Albums ON.
4. Open the Photos app and select your Shared Album.
5. Set that album as your screensaver through the Apple TV screensaver settings.

The screen saver has always had a cache that will only show maybe 400-500 photos. I’ve broken mine down into 14 albums of around 400 each. Now, with iCloud, it takes a while to load the cache so if you choose an album it’ll take a while to cache whatever number it is. If you start the screen saver right away it’ll only show a few different pics.

I’m choosing an album in the morning to show that evening. I don’t like it but… thanks Apple.

I ran across the same issue after upgrading to 27 and i also have no interest in iCloud Photos. Home sharing option is a great way to have access to photos stored on my mac mini. I disabled automatic system upgrades on my other apple tv but dont know how long before tvOS 26 stops working.

OS 27:

OS 26:

[Edited by Moderator]

I struggled a for a while to get the feature working until I searched the web and found this thread. This is a sad day, I use this feature since my first Apple TV. I hope they return the feature as I will not be putting years of photos on shared albums. I use to use the smart album feature that allows me to see the last three months of photos updating automatically on my MacBook and auto refresh on the Apple TV screensaver. This feel like a money grab to increase my subscription with iCloud. SMH

Thanks so much, Delta, it works for me. It seems to be cycling through all of my photos for the first time in years. Besides playing my own playlists of music I found I can also start the Radio Paradise app and listen to it while my slide show appears on the screen.

Yep, I’m doing the same. It does better than the old screensaver since it appears to cycle through the entire album rather than just the buffer, but it is not nearly as convenient. That convenience was part of the Apple magic — it just works together. In that vein, this was a tactical error that works against the brand rather than leveraging it by improving the screensaver’s use through home sharing.

The reason I bought a new Apple TV (my 7th one), 10 months ago, was to continue streaming my photos from my iMac (2TB), but now in 4K. Now I cannot do this any more since TVOS 27. Can I return my Apple TV that is under warranty?

When I first made the switch to Mac, my brother told me that for every 9 things Apple does right, they do 1 that is terribly wrong. That seems to hold true. This is the biggest "1" I have ever seen. I have 5 Apple TV's and the biggest reason I spent the money on them was to have access to my movie and music library, and to have my screen saver come on with family photos while listening to music. Even just turning it on and letting photos play when we're not watching anything else. We really enjoy it. Family members have bought Apple TV's just becuase they saw what we did with our photo library on it. I hope Apple thinks twice about this horrible decision and puts it back. I'm not using the cloud for my photo library, no matter how much Apple wants to force it for more money.

I am having the same issue... The new Screen saver keeps shuffling the same 10 photos. even though there are 5000 photos in that album. Please restore the old way.

Does anybody know if there is a way to revert to tvos26?

Yep, that works. It’s just not as convenient as the screensaver.