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iPad How do I fix zoomed in photos in Wallpaper?

Tikatika

Tikatika

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 12, 2012
712
797
Northern California
The photos looked perfectly scaled in Photos app, but when I set them as wallpaper, they become distorted, blurry and completely zoomed in.

First time using iOS 7 and would appreciate some guidance as to how to fix this.

Edit: going to move this to wallpaper forum.
 
Last edited:
Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. Turn that off.

This will also disable many iOS 7 screen effects are well.
 
richardbb85 said:
i just dont get why it zoom in like that
Click to expand...

Its the parallax wallpaper effect. For it to work there has to be extra image outside of the screen bounds so when you told your device that extra image comes into view. If it didn't automatically zoom in a little you would see a black border as soon as you tiled your device. The only built in ay to disable this is to turn on reduce motion in accessibility, but that also turns off the rest of the icon motion along with parallax you see everywhere else like the tabs in Safari.

Photos synced over to your device are scaled down to your iPad's resolution to save disc space, so if you want them to be sharp email higher res files and keep them in your camera roll. If you use photos that have a lot of image around the subject then it won't matter because you can adjust the wallpaper image so the subject is still centered; just don't use photos that are closely cropped to the subject.

There are also some apps that help with this.
 
Paralax is turned off on mine, yet it still zoomes in the wallpaper. It's a bug in iOS 7. Take screenshot of your home screen and try to use that as a wallpaper, you'll see.
 
Easiest solution is to edit the photo in "photos" and crop it - select "square" as your cropping method.
 
It's not a bug, it's a very annoying "feature" of iOS7. I agree that it's very annoying, but it's actually meant to work that way in iOS7. In iOS6, you could use any size/shape photo, and the OS would add black bars as needed to fill out the screen. iOS 7 did 2 things that contribute to this issue:

1. It added parallax, which requires a small amount of zoom-in to allow for the motion effects

2. It removed the option of adding black bars to background photos, so it has to zoom in a LOT (the exact amount depends on the orientation of your screen, and the aspect ratio of your photo)

Turning off parallax pretty much solves the issue for many backgrounds on the iPhone, because issue #2 ONLY has to deal with portrait mode. But it is MUCH worse on the iPad because it has to handle both portrait and landscape modes. Your background photo can't be in both portrait AND landscape mode unless it is square, and even then, it has to zoom in by a certain amount because your screen isn't square.

If you really want backgrounds to behave the same way they did on iOS6 (with black bars on one side and no zooming in), you need to modify the photo by manually adding black bars on one side or the other to make it square. There is a nice (free) app designed for this exact purpose, and it's called InstaFix. Just use that, and stop searching for a better solution, because there isn't one.
 
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