Placing a Picture

Documentation / Contents - Background

• Overview of the Background Panel
  • The Two Pages
  • The Buttons Along the Bottom
• Choosing a Pattern
• Choosing a Picture
  • The Picture List
  • The Preview and the Facts Line
• Placing a Picture
  • Fill (crop to fit)
  • Stretch
  • Scale (letterbox)
  • Center
  • Tile
• Colour Schemes
  • The Scheme List
  • Lock Scheme to Wallpaper
  • Make Scheme From Wallpaper
• The Canonical Panels
• Where the Settings Live
  • Adding Your Own Pictures
• Copyright Information

Placing a Picture

A picture is rarely the exact shape of your screen. The Placement radio buttons decide what to do about that. They apply to pictures only; a pattern is always tiled.

The preview follows your choice, so the quickest way to decide is to click through the five and look.

Fill (crop to fit)

Enlarge the picture until it covers the screen, keeping its proportions, and let the overhanging edges fall off. Nothing is distorted and nothing is left blank; you lose the edges of the picture.

This is the default and it is the right answer for most photographs.

Stretch

Pull the picture to exactly the screen's shape. Nothing is cropped and nothing is blank, but the proportions change: circles become ovals.

Stretch is not an apology. With wallpapers filed at four different shapes, most screens get a mismatch, and for a landscape or an abstract the distortion is invisible while the crop would not be. Try it before assuming Fill is better.

Scale (letterbox)

Enlarge the picture until it just fits inside the screen, keeping its proportions. The whole picture is visible; bars of the background colour appear on two sides.

Use this when the picture's content matters more than a full screen, for example a diagram or a photograph you do not want cropped.

Center

Put the picture at its native size in the middle of the screen, with the background colour around it. No scaling at all, so it is exactly as sharp as the file.

A picture smaller than your screen will be surrounded. A picture larger than your screen will have its edges cut off.

Tile

Repeat the picture at its native size across the whole screen, starting at the top left. This suits a small seamless texture and suits nothing else; a tiled photograph looks like a tiled photograph.

Which To Use

Matches your screen shape     any of them; Fill is simplest
Photograph, wrong shape       Fill, or Stretch if crop hurts
Artwork you must see all of   Scale
Small image, want it sharp    Center
Small seamless texture        Tile

See Choosing a Picture for the list and the facts line that tells you the picture's native size.