How do you stop iOS 7 from auto enlarging your background picture?

Kurt Lang wrote:

Created to the correct size, in portrait mode, you see all of the height of your image, but the width (of course) gets cut off. Turned to landscape orientation, you see all of the width, but the height gets cut off.

Not on MY iPad 3! 😠

Here's where my convoluted workaround originated.

Do I just have a bug in my iPad?

Or do I need an iPad 4 or later to get the correct behavior?

No, you're not doing anything wrong. Apple changed something in the 7.1.2 update that royally screwed things up. I had to add a note to the user tip I had written that it no longer works.

Before that last small point update, files created at a specific size would fit perfectly in both orientations, didn't scale in either position, and automatically centered themselves. Now new images you're prepping to be your desktop come in in a seemingly random position, and when turned to landscape mode, scale up (as you noticed). Having Reduce Motion on no longer helps. You get the parallax scaling whether you want it or not.

Apple has made it extremely difficult to do something that should be extremely easy. It's especially irritating that Apple's supplied desktop images always work as they're supposed to (centered and no scaling in either orientation), but yours won't. It would help a LOT if users could copy off even just one of the supplied images so you can see exactly what pixel size those images are, but you can't get at them.

I thought I was going crazy!

Glad to know it really is a serious Apple engineering flaw.

This, and what seems to me to be a general slump in overall performance. Apple users have a lot to grumble about right now.

I've been seriously considering moving to another platform for all my mobile computing. Apple, are you paying attention?

There are numerous apps in the App Store that will scale photos for use as wallpaper on an iPhone or iPad. I use Wallax but there are others. Right now that is probably the best way to go.

Here are the actual supplied still images in iOS 7. Likely had to jailbrake the iPad in order to pull the images. But here's what really telling. Apple themselves don't even come close to showing an image edge to edge. In portrait orientation, the non shaded area is all you see of the image:

This includes the part at the bottom that falls under the blurred bar. If I rotate the image to landscape mode, it stays perfectly centered, without scaling, and hits right where you would expect:

The originals are still 2524 pixels square. Much of it wasted since it doesn't show.

Knowing that, I tried to build an image so you see everything on the screen you want without scaling. It still doesn't work! I created a square image at 2064 pixels (the live area you see above), then padded it out with black to 2524 square.

Even though it's exactly the same as the supplied image, it comes in too small in portrait mode, and scales too large when turned to landscape mode. This just doesn't make any sense. 😠

Yup, that's what I ended up doing. Spent 99¢ on Wallpaper Fix. Both it and Wallex require a bit of a learning curve to figure out how to use it correctly (so you get the results you want), but they do work.

I noticed the behaviour of Apple Wallpapers too, and came to the conclusion that iOS 7 makes a clear distinction between an image selected from the Apple Wallpaper library as opposed to a user image. Incongruous!

For user images, to have direct creative control, under present anomalous scaling behaviour, my workaround seems to account for the nonsense: i.e. sizing the desired visible portion of a landscape image to 2524px wide for parallax (making the visible vertical portion 1893px based on 4:3 physical aspect) and then padding the vertical to 3365px to encompass Apple's massive overscaling.

I assume Wallex, Wallpaper Fix, etc. are doing the same thing but depriving the user of a 1:1 correspondence between image pixels and screen pixels, thus degrading the result. Of course, if Apple does another flip-flop on this issue, then these apps would be updated to accommodate it.

and came to the conclusion that iOS 7 makes a clear distinction between an image selected from the Apple Wallpaper library as opposed to a user image. Incongruous!

While it shouldn't make the slightest difference where the image is on your device, that is a good conclusion. It's not in the folder with the rest of the supplied images, so it's acted on differently. Though it did exactly the same as Apple's images before this last upgrade. Images created 2524 pixels square came in centered and rotated on center without scaling, edge to edge. It was perfect. Was being the operative word.

I assume Wallex, Wallpaper Fix, etc. are doing the same thing but depriving the user of a 1:1 correspondence between image pixels and screen pixels, thus degrading the result.

Nope, they work a bit differently than that. It's rather hard to explain because you have to go through a multi step process that requires a lot of manual fudging of image position and sizing. First in the utility to get the image where you want it, where you then take a screen shot, which it saves as a Camera Roll image that doesn't have the shorter sides cut off. Then you bring that image in as your wallpaper and fudge with position again until you get it positioned just right. Once you succeed, it works well. The image rotates on center without scaling, and isn't scaled way up (pixelated) to accommodate sizing to fill.