Forum Discussion

userbosco's avatar
userbosco
Reel Rookie
8 months ago

What is the Photo Stream photo limit?

Hello!  I was super excited to see Roku add this personalization feature to Roku, so thank you.  The site says you can load 20 pics at a time with a maximum of 1,000 photos.  I've uploaded around 600, but when the photo stream screen saver activates, it doesn't deviate from the first few dozen pictures uploaded.  Why say there is a limit of 1,000 when the screen saver will only rotate a few dozen?  Am I missing a setting?  If the limit is so few, why not rescind the language regarding the 1,000 picture limit?  Thanks!

screensaver & theme
tv & player features

2 Replies

  • marco8888's avatar
    marco8888
    Reel Rookie
    4 months ago

    This isn't rocket science, just show every photo that people put up. It's obvious you people are not working on this issue it would have been solved a long time ago you just don't care. In that case present us with an app from somebody that does know what they are doing. Digital picture frames of been out on the market for over 10 years it's not a secret, lol. 

  • krkaufman's avatar
    krkaufman
    Streaming Star
    5 months ago
    userbosco wrote:

    I was super excited to see Roku add this personalization feature to Roku ...  I've uploaded around 600, but when the photo stream screen saver activates, it doesn't deviate from the first few dozen pictures uploaded.  

    userbosco, like you, I was super excited to notice Photo Streams over the holidays, with the hopes of reviving the photo slideshows we'd had back in our ReplayTV and XBMC days, but I was quickly frustrated as I began building my image streams ... noticing photos seemingly never displayed.  

    So, to get to the point and answer your question, I recently did some testing and mapped-out what I believe to be the Photo Streams "image selection depth" limitations (how deep into a stream the content selector will dive), and max unique photos that would be displayed over time dependent on the number of photo streams enabled.

    Summary:

    • "Image selection depth" per stream ranges from 100 down to 40 depending on the number of enabled streams: up to 100 images for a single stream, or up to (200 / # of streams) for 2-5 selected streams. (So, only the nearest 100, 67, 50 & 40 images max from each stream for 2, 3, 4 & 5+ enabled streams)

    • Re: "5+" ... When more than 5 streams are enabled, on slideshow initialization, the Photo Streams Slideshow content selector will randomly choose 5 streams from among the 20 most recently enabled steams. Barring manual intervention to alter enabled streams, content in streams beyond the 20 most recently enabled streams will be ignored and never displayed. (So, given the limits described in these two bullets, the max unique images displayed over time is 200 for 1-4 streams and 200-800 for 5+ streams ... 40 x # of enabled streams, limited to the 20 most recently enabled streams.)

    • empty/shallow streams: Beware enabled streams with few or zero images. The slideshow content selector doesn't ignore empty streams, so having empty streams enabled or several streams with few photos can pull down a given slideshow's image count well below the normal 100 limit. As an example, 5 empty streams being enabled would result in 0 user-uploaded images being selected and the stock photo slideshow being displayed, instead.


    Please see the following links in a related thread for more info and a graphic illustrating the limits: