As many of you have written (and for sure Roku staff have seen the posts), there are bugs and unstated limits inherent in using your own photos as a screensaver. When uploading photos directly to Roku (not using Google Photos), the limit was 100 photos per album with an unstated limit for the number of albums then the limit was changed to 1000 photos per album. I have now stressed the limits using both direct uploads to Roku and Google photo albums and tried to decipher what their software is doing when it tries to select which photos to display. Perhaps others have done this and could share their experiences and maybe we can zero in on how this actually works. Or, Roku could just tell us (IMAGINE THAT!)
I have uploaded as many as 6000 photos directly to Roku in collections of 100. The randomizer is poor - it selects only a subset of photos and then just shows them in a looped sequence and often repeats the same subset and many photos available are never selected. And when they changed the limit to 1000 photos per collection, the randomizing software more or less broke and started exhibiting a recency bias only showing a subset of the most recently uploaded photos.
When they upped the limit to 1000, I wanted to change to having the 6000 photos in 6 collections of 1000 instead of 60 collections of 100 but killing it all off and uploading 6000 photos again in batches of 20 (C'mon Roku!) was just too much of a task just to see what set of bugs that would expose. So I linked to Google Photos where I could upload 1000 photos at a time and started linking albums to Roku to see if it would work any better. I also labeled all my photos with text so I know which album they are in and where in the 1000 they are so when they are displayed I get a bit of information about how the randomizing algorithm works. Here are the conditions I created and the outcomes I observed so far:
- I had about 10000 photos stored in Google Photos and made 10 albums with just under 1000 photos in each. If I linked all 10 albums to Roku, when the screensaver kicked in it would somewhat randomly pick a subset (3?) of the 10 and show photos from just that subset. Not too bad if it displays randomly from the 3000 photos available in the chosen albums and then next time it picks a different subset. But it does nothing like this. It will "reach" only about 40 photos deep into the selected albums and then loop through the same ones repeatedly. So only the first pictures in each album are even eligible to be selected and the remaining 960 photos in each album are never shown.
- So I wondered if there was only one album of 1000 photos for it to show from would it show those 1000 pictures randomly. So I removed 9 of the albums from the link to Roku and showed only pictures from one album. It "reached" a little deeper into this album but still chose only from about the first 90 photos and the remaining 910 were never displayed.
- Since it was choosing only a small number of photos from the "front" of any given album I wondered what would happen if I changed it to 100 albums of 100 photos each. There I ran into interesting (and undocumented) limits. If there are more that 50 Google Photos albums, when you try to link them to Roku, only the first 50 show up. Any additional albums in Google Photos are not available to be chosen. And then if you link all 50, the PhotoStreams app itself will only see 25.
- With 25 albums you still can't get 2500 photos to show randomly - once again it "reaches" only about 40 photos deep into each one and it shows the same subset often and leaves most of the linked photos out entirely never showing them.
These are tentative conclusions but I think the best you can do at this point is to have 1000 photos in 25 albums of 40 photos each. Each time the screensaver kicks in it will show only a subset and it appears to repeat the same subset often. I think many of the 1000 will never be shown but at this point this is my best guess as to how to get the most photos randomly displayed.
I doubt anyone else has tinkered with this to this extent but if anyone has knowledge to share that might be helpful, please reply with your experience and insights. As for Roku bots or employees crawling the forum and reading this - here is what we don't need:
- to be told to reboot our device
- to be told to provide serial numbers
- to be told to send you a photo of the error message
- to be told that you need more information
And here is what we do need:
- to be told how the randomizing and selection algorithm works
- to be told the limits and how to optimize within the limits
- or even better - to have our Roku devices updated with software that actually randomly displays from ALL the pictures we make available
