Proper Wallpaper Size Is Not Exactly 1024 x 1024 px

All over the Web, the advice is that iPad wallpaper should be sized at exactly 1024px square, the dimensions of the iPad screen.

But an image that size will actually be shrunk by the iPad to fit inside the area under the black bar that shows time, battery and wifi strength.

It's subtle, but the software shrinking changes the image -- one of my images looks noticeably less sharp after it's altered that way on the iPad.

That black bar is probably something like 10px or so, making the actual, proper size of wallpaper something closer to 1014px square.

Does anyone know the size of that black bar, or some way to determine it?

Mac Pro (early 2008) 2.8 GHz Quad-Core, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Apr 12, 2010 11:18 AM

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3 replies

Apr 12, 2010 11:51 AM in response to Ian Parkinson

The screen is 1024 high, but the black bar across the top is 20 px high, so the area available to the wallpaper is actually 1004px.

And if you make wallpaper 1024 x 768, it will work only in one orientation. Turn the iPad the other way, and your 768 dimension will be stretched to 1024. That's why the common advice is to create a 1024 x 1024 image, which will be cropped to fit each orientation.

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Proper Wallpaper Size Is Not Exactly 1024 x 1024 px

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