Ambient is broken, keeps ignoring settings

[ellarsee]

I have a Chromecast Ultra, for the past several years I've had Ambient set to display photos from my albums. 
It took a lot of work to get them to display properly, I had to export them in lightroom to the TV aspect ratio otherwise the chromecast would insist on filling the screen and mess up my composition.  But, I eventually worked around the bugs and it worked OK, until a short while ago.
Now, every time I watch a show on Netflix and exit, rather than than showing my photos it shows the crappy default catalog, until I go into the Home app, and go onto settings.
I don't have to do anything, it's still "set correctly", it just doesn't do the right thing until I go into settings.

[Robert-M]

I am having the same issue

[JB00001]

Same issue

[Jeran]

Hey there everyone,

I'm really sorry to hear that all of you are not seeing your albums in Ambient Mode, I'd be happy to look into this. The first thing I would check is the photo curation setting. With this setting, From your existing private and shared albums, Google Photos attempts to remove objectively bad photos (blurry, poor exposure, low resolution, near duplicates) but will not otherwise curate the contents of your albums. You can completely turn off curation for private and shared albums by changing the "Personal photo curation" setting to "Live albums only." No curation at all is done on your Favorites.

I look forward to your responses, and if you have any other questions or concerns for me, please let me know.

Best regards,
Jeran

[ellarsee]

I did turn curation to "live photos only". As a note the documentation/help in the software is somewhere between horrid and non-existent.
I don't understand how curation would sometimes turn everything off, and since I had it set up to only show my selected albums, many of which are photos that I have shown in galleries, and some of which I have even sold, if your curation software is culling everything in that batch it is severely broken.
I would think that it would be able to find at least one of my photos that it considers to be not utterly crap such that it insisted on showing the default galleries.
The problem has eased up a bit, I don't know if someone pushed a software update, or if it is because I've been watching a show on prime this past week rather than netflix. I have plenty of my own software to debug at work and I don't have the time and energy to debug yours for free.

[Jeran]

Hey there ellarsee,

I'm glad to hear that the issue has been eased a bit. I know in the past that the photo curation settings has been a bit picky in what photos it uses for Ambient Mode because it tries to find the most aesthetically pleasing photos it thinks it can find. However, sometimes, like you said, it removes most photos because of that. If you would like, you can submit feedback via the Google Home app to let Google know about the issues you had with this setting, but there is no pressure to do so.

I appreciate your patience on this, and if you have any other questions, please let me know.

Thank you,
Jeran

[ellarsee]

Setting it to only curate live albums did help, but that doesn't explain why it would simply stop showing my albums when I exited netflix.

[Jeran]

Hey there ellarsee,

That is a strange issue, I would make sure both the Google Home app and the Netflix app are up-to-date. Then, go ahead and clear out the cached app data on both of those apps as well. Let me know if the problem still persists afterwards.

Thank you,
Jeran

[Jeran]

Hey there ellarsee,

Do you have any more questions or need any additional help? 

Thank you,
Jeran

[Jeran]

Hey ellarsee,

Do you have any more questions that we can address? If not, I'll go ahead and lock up this thread in 24 hours.

Just checking up,
Jeran