Photon can play straight from a cloud drive or a network share, with no media server anywhere in it. You choose which folders it reads, and those folders become shelves in the app.
Drives are a Pro feature.
What you can connect
| Dropbox | Sign in to your account | iPhone, iPad, Mac |
| Google Drive | Sign in to your account | iPhone, iPad, Mac |
| OneDrive | Sign in to your account | All four |
| WebDAV | Address and username | All four |
| Nextcloud | Address and username | All four |
| ownCloud | Address and username | All four |
Nextcloud and ownCloud are WebDAV underneath, with their own layout already known, so you enter your site’s own address — https://cloud.example.com — rather than the full DAV path.
Dropbox and Google Drive are not available on Apple TV. OneDrive and WebDAV shares are.
Adding a drive
- Go to Settings ▸ Drives ▸ Add Drive.
- Pick the kind.
- Sign in. Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive open the service’s own sign-in page, so nothing is typed into photon but your existing account. WebDAV, Nextcloud and ownCloud take an address, a username and a password, which travels with each request.
- Browse the drive and add the folders that hold your videos.
Choosing folders
Each folder you add becomes a shelf. Everything else on the drive is ignored: photon does not index a whole account, and it does not look inside folders you did not add.
Settings ▸ Drives ▸ your drive ▸ Folders adds and removes them later. A folder you remove takes its shelf out of the app, and nothing on the drive is touched.
What a drive can and cannot do
- It plays and downloads exactly as a server does, including offline.
- There is no metadata. No server is fetching artwork, descriptions or cast, so a drive’s shelves are the files themselves. Clear filenames and a tidy folder structure are what make them readable.
- Search is what photon can list. WebDAV has no reliable search of its own, so searching a drive means searching the folders you added rather than the whole account.
- Removing a drive removes its shelves and its sign-in. Nothing on the drive is deleted.
When a drive stops working
- A Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive authorisation can be revoked from the service’s own account page. Remove the drive in photon and add it again.
- A folder that has gone empty usually means it was moved or renamed on the drive. Add it again under Folders.
- A WebDAV address is the DAV endpoint, not the web interface you sign in to in a browser.