My dad sent me this, but I don’t have a smart TV. Anyone got some knowledgeable input?
We could use some help with knowing what we need in order to show our pictures on a TV hung on the wall in the dinning room. {one recommended TV is on sale for just a few more days)
I’ve been told that some smart TV’s can shuffle-play photos from an attached memory. I don’t know what that’s called, or how to know that a given TV can do that.
I’m thinking of getting a thin 1-2 TB hard drive and putting it behind the TV - don’t think we need to do it wirelessly. Don’t need a 4k TV, because a 3 Mb photo probably wouldn’t make use of the greater resolution.
Can some TV’s shuffle-play files and let you select how long each is displayed, and in the case of pictures, let you select still photos vs videos, since I was told no TV can select at random from both stills and videos.
One salesman said I would need to get an app in order to do all this, and he was confident one was available. He said some TV’s have a small amount of memory to store an app like that…Another salesman implied that an app wasn’t necessary, that some TV’s have the smarts to do that already.
Maybe there’s other things that need to be considered; I don’t know.
What kind of TV are we talking about? Your father has a Smart TV I’m assuming?
I don’t have a Smart TV either, but I’d imagine you can just copy pictures onto a USB flash drive (or SD card) and plug it into the TV. The TV should be able to recognize what it is and automatically launch its photo viewing app.
One option you could conciser (if the TV doesn’t do this natively) is get a cheap tablet with HDMI output, connect it to the TV, and have it play the photos on shuffle. (It wouldn’t have 1 to 2 TB of storage, but then again, I doubt that you have the 300,000 to 600,000 3MB photos needed to fill one of those.)
Another thing to look into is what type of USB drives does the TV support?
It’ll certainly handle FAT32 formatted thumb drives. Maybe FAT32 formatted external USB drivers. But NTFS or other drive formats may be a real issue.
Since you’re doing pictures, the 2GB limit on file size for FAT32 isn’t going to be an issue. (Unlike big videos.)
You’re going to have to do a lot of research on each model you’re considering. Get and read the manual. Check user comments posted regarding actual usage. (Not always the same as the manual. May be better, may be worse.)
Our Samsung has a media player button on the remote, which starts a media player that lets you look at photos and videos stored on a flash drive plugged into the TV’s USB port. No shuffle option, and for some reason it gives me a file not supported message for about 10% of the videos it sees. It’ll do in a pinch, but a better option is to use a laptop in the HDMI port.
If I’m doing the math right, a 1TB drive would hold over 333,000 3MB photos, and the 2TB drive would of course hold twice that, at 666,000. Maybe they have a lot of photos, but a thumb drive might work fine with less headaches, you don’t have to figure out how to mount it and route the USB cable, etc.