Android: Technical Details for Creating Wallpaper (HOWTO, Tutorial)

After years of waiting, I finally got a smartphone of the Android ilk. One big advantage of Android is that the devices are fairly open, so a normal human can make their own wallpaper, ringtones, and software (OK, a mostly-normal human).

I was astounded that, although there is lots of free wallpaper available, and there is even a video walking one through using Photoshop, there's no simple text page that summarizes what one must do. In fact, there are a couple of tricky points in the process. This Is Now That Page.

Please be advised this page assumes some level of technical background. Nothing that can't be filled in with some trips to a search engine and Wikipedia.

What is Wallpaper?

Wallpaper is the image shown behind the icons on the home screen. Search for "wallpaper" in Marketplace if you want to get pre-made ones.

To make your own, be aware that wallpaper is just a simple 640x480 raster image. (At least, on the G1 and MyTouch3G, the two current devices. Future devices probably will have different size screens.) Of this image, half gets shown on each of the three workspaces, with an overlap (see this Namshik tutorial for a picture).

It seems like several raster image file formats can be used as wallpaper, including PNG and JPG. I recommend PNG because it's lossless (see wikipage about image file formats for details), but JPG (JPEG) works well too. (Other common formats like TIFF, GIF, and BMP may work, but I haven't tried them.)

Making Your Wallpaper

You should make your image however you want. Just make sure you end up saving it as a 640x480 size raster image. (Actually, you can use other sizes and fix things in the phone, but you should try to do all the hard work on a real computer.)

Some tools you might want to look at are Adobe Photoshop (see the CoolPsTuts video if you want photoshop handholding), Gimp (free), or even Microsoft Paint. There are also on-line tools that do editing, although I haven't used them. Or just take a nice photo with a digital camera and resize it to be 640x480.

Getting Your Wallpaper to Your Phone

There are several ways to get your wallpaper to your phone. I describe each at a high level because the exact details differ depending on what computer you're using with your phone.

• USB cable:
  1. Plug your phone in to a computer with a USB cable.
  2. Make the phone's storage available to the computer (look in the notification bar on the phone for the "USB" notification, and select the "mount" button).
  3. Copy the image into the "download" directory on the phone.

• download from the web:
  1. Put your image on a website. (Maybe you have one, maybe you use facebook or geocities, or whatever.) Make sure the website doesn't resize the image, (most photo sharing sites automatically resize the image---you don't want that, or you must know how to get around that).
  2. Open the web browser on your phone and go to the website.
  3. Save the image by long pressing on it, then selecting "save image..." from the menu that pops up. It will end up in your Gallery application.

• Over Bluetooth or Wifi: In principle one should be able to copy the image over Bluetooth or Wifi from a PC, but I don't know how.

After you've completed these steps, the image should be in the downloads directory on your phone. When you run the Gallery application, there should be a download section with your images in it.

Getting Your Wallpaper to Your Home Screen

Finally you need to get your wallpaper on to your home screen. Several paths, all alike:

• Long click on a blank part of the home screen and click on "wallpapers" and "Select wallpaper from...Pictures" on the menus that pop up.
• Run the Gallery application, navigate to show the picture you want on the whole screen, then select "Set as..." and "Set picture as...Wallpaper"

Android now pops up your picture with an orange box to let you crop the wallpaper. This is Dumb. Your image is 640x480, but Android wants you to take a subset of it. Don't do that, since it will then expand the image and make an ugly, pixelated mess. (Google: why doesn't this default to the size of your screen?!)

Instead: slide the orange box to a corner of your image, then touch and drag the opposite corner until the orange box covers your whole image. Finally, click the "save" button. You will get a "saving picture" alert, then a "setting wallpaper" alert, then finally a new home screen wallpaper.

Enjoy!