Apple TV 3, a first impression

Looking for a way to easily stream my Africa pics to my TV, I stumbled upon the Apple TV and decided to buy it for EUR 109. Package comes in a box and the form factor of the gadget is small & sexy, black matches my TV furniture ;-)

Installation equally simple, had it up & running in 5 minutes. Beware to have both an HDMI and optical audio cable available.

Currently, I have about 12,500 pics to view. In several folders. Obviously my Africa 2011 folder is the largest, with some 2,500 pics shot from a Canon 550D at 18M. 

I took me a while to find out that you don't push pics to the Apple TV, as you would expect with Airplay. Instead, you make the Apple TV pull the pics from your iTines library. Had I known sooner, I wouldn't have bought the iPhoto software at EUR 12,00 from the Apple Store :(

Here's the nice discoveries I made:

1. you make iTunes share your photo library

2. you tell the Apple TV to look at Computers and simply select the iTunes library you just shared;

3. you configure the Slideshow in the Apple TV and simply watch your pictures

4. be patient, coz the systems may need some time to sync. (this seemed to take up to a day in my case)

What's even nicer, I didn't configure music in my slide show. I simply use Spotify off my iPhone to push music into my Apple TV. Discovered that pausing the slide show with the Apple TV Remote also pauses Spotify on my iPhone.

Of course the Apple TV has more features, but I'm sure others have investigated those in far more detail than I do. If you have any questions about photo-streaming with Apple TV, feel free to reach out though.

My conclusion: I like it, and am still happy I abandoned Microsoft earlier this year.