AppleTV (second and third generation, aka the black pucks) only do photo sharing over the LAN via Home Sharing. Home Sharing is iTunes only, no 3rd party has cracked how it works.

Originally Posted By: Synology
Although we have evidence that the protocol of Home Sharing is much the same as the DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol) used in iTunes Server, the authentication mechanism prevents us from developing a solution to browse your media collection on your DiskStation and control the playback using the remote.


The older iTunes Server was only supported with the First gen Apple TV (white hot running boxes).

No Apple device natively supports DLNA. iTunes Server is based on an alternate standard that predates DLNA a little bit, but never saw adoptance outside the Apple world. DLNA is heavily tied to uPnP, whereas the iTunes Server is more bound to Bonjour (a uPnP alternative).


If cloud solutions are in the mix, it opens the following paths for photos to the Apple TV puck units:

- iCloud Photo Streams. Both personal and shared photo streams. I currently use this method for my Apple TV.

- Flickr, which still offers 1TB of photo storage for free

- (Coming soon) iCloud Photo Library, currently in open beta. This will move peoples photo libraries to be hosted in iCloud and accessible to any iOS device, Apple TV, Mac or Windows machine. iCloud users get 5GB free of storage, and can buy additional storage. I plan to migrate to this once they have the Mac part released. This is the move that is also killing off iPhoto and Apeture on the Mac in favor of a new photo editing program that runs on iCloud Libraries.


Edited by drakino (22/10/2014 18:06)
Edit Reason: Added synology quite about HomeSharing