Random Photo Slideshow Not Random at all

I have thousands of photos saved to a single folder on my external USB hard drive. When I play a photo slideshow using the random option it seems like only a very limited number of photos will be displayed. The sequence of the photos is pretty much the same so there really is not much “randomness” at all.

I have the latest firmware installed. All of the photos are displayed properly if I manually browse and select them individually so there isn’t a compatibility issue. I also own a Free Agent Theater + and the random photo slideshow on that unit works fine with no problems.

Is this basically a limitation or is there a workaraound for this?

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

There is not limitation, please make sure that the slideshows is set to shuffle/repeat all and shuffle under setup> photo settings> slideshows sequence.

I’m noticing the same thing and I think I’ve found out a little bit about it but don’t know of any workaround.

I’ve got about 10,000 pictures across multiple folders stored locally on the Live Hub.  I originally had set the screen saver to be the random photo slideshow and chose the parent folder of all of my picture folders.  I immediately noticed that it kept showing pictures from the same few folders.  I then decided to just dump everything into one folder, thinking that it might having an issue with all of the subfolders.  No noticeable difference. 

I went into this folder manually and clicked the play button on the first picture.  For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that my pictures are named img_00001 through img_10000 and that I started the slideshow on img_00001.  The only pictures that were shown were img_00001 through img_01000 and img_09000 through img_10000…1000 pictures in either direction from where I started.

I tested this again by getting to img_08000 and hitting play.  I now saw img_07000 through img_09000…1000 pictures in either direction of img_08000. 

The pictures are played randomly but it doesn’t seem to be using all of the pictures in the slideshow.  It’s as if there is some algorithm that takes the current picture and adds/subtracts a random number between 1 and 1000 to choose the next picture.  If there are more than 2000 pictures in the folder it will never get to all of them.

If anybody has any insight into this or can replicate this behavior, please chime in as I’d like to be able to put on a random slideshow that will go through all of my pictures.  Thanks.

**EDIT** Double post.

Your post was blank. Using IE9? Check this post:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Forum-Feedback/IE9-and-WDC-Forum-Compatibility/m-p/167170/message-uid/167170#U167170

I had the photo setting set to “shuffle” all along but the problem still exists. I tried a previous firmware version to see if that would make a difference but it did not.

boomshnka describes the issue in far more detail but that is exactly what I see happening as well. The Hub simply cannot play a LARGE number of p[hotos randomly. I wonder if this issue can or will be fixed with a firmware update.

Thanks to TonyPH12345 for the info.