Just wondering if anyone else can confirm this or find a fix. I have a 400+ image folder in iPhoto for my wallpapers, all of which are 1920x1080 or higher. My MacBook is the older 13" model with a resolution of 1280x800, so everything in there is consistently larger than my actual resolution. That said, after Mavericks, the options in setting the wallpaper (which allows for fit to screen, stretch, center, etc.) showed me that there's a huge issue. When I choose center, none of my wallpapers actually fill the screen, as if they're all smaller than 1280x800, and stretching them makes them look grainy, as if actually stretching them to fit if they're too small a resolution. This is super frustrating, as the little preview shows the centered image to be much larger, but the actual desktop does not reflect it. Manually choosing a file and setting it as the desktop picture does not work/make a difference either. This really sucks as I have many wallpapers, all of which now look like crap because they are not being rendered in their native resolution, even though ALL OF THEM are larger than my MacBook's 1280x800 native resolution. Is anyone else experiencing this? It's very very annoying and I hope there is a fix or workaround.
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Mavericks Ruined my Wallpapers?
- Thread starter Krauser
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You are not alone. Mavericks on my late 2013 13" rMBP doesn't give me the option to stretch/center/fit screen. All wallpapers, including Apple supplied images, appear slightly blurry & pixelated on my two external 1280x1024 displays. They all appear "centered" (cannot switch to fit screen mode) and none of them appear sharp.
WOW, I can't believe I just noticed this. What on Earth is Apple trying to pull here? Are they really trying to turn OS X into iOS by removing features? Because if so, I'm out and going W7 full-time.
As usual I spoke too soon. Sort of. The functionality to Fill Screen/Center/etc. have been removed from Apple supplied background images. Selecting a user supplied background image allows that functionality. Maybe this is the way it always worked and I simply forgot. The way to restore said functionality to Apple supplied images would be to copy them from "/Library/Desktop Pictures" to another folder and then add that folder manually to System Preferences.
Either way, the quality of the image scaling is quite poor, at least on non-retina displays. And I'm going off topic so I stop now.
I admit I overreacted then. But still, they shouldn't handicap anything. Give us the option and let us choose, even with default wallpapers.