Scale desktop pic in OSX without crop...?

[aki]

I'm sure there must be really obvious answer but I'm too dense to find it...

The OSX Preferences let you set a folder of desktop pictures and it works great, except if I have photos that are not the size of the desktop. Then, whether I choose "Fill Screen" or any of the other options, I will get some photos displayed with the bottom and the top off-screen.

Is there any way to get OSX to scale the picture to fit correctly on the desktop (including taking into account the menu bar at the top would be nice..)?

Alternatively, is there any software which does this?

 

[janey]

you cant do that without distorting the image (things look too fat or skinny or long) or changing the res of your screen.

 

[aki]

Hm... I heard about a app for OS9 called decore that scaled pics for desktop correctly - is there anything similar for OSX that anyone knows about?

 

[cb911]

scale without crop? i'm not sure if that's exactly what you mean... but you realise that if you want to keep the same size ratio for the picture and try to fit it to a screen with a different size ratio it will always crop.

the best option for not cropping anything is 'stretch to fit'. that will keep all of the image within the screen, but it will also distort the image by 'stretching' it. hence the option name of 'stretch to fit'.

if you want a pic to fill the screen your best bet is probably to resize either the width or height to the size of your screen... but then you'll lose a bit of the picture still. that's unavoidable.

 

[nbs2]

scale a large picture

I have several pictures from vacations that I have taken that are too large for the desktop on my pb15. What I would like to do is scale those images down so they fit my screen. For the images that are smaller than the desktop, they are fine as is, with a black border and all. I was wondering if there was a way to do this withot altering all my pictures in iPhoto. It's just irritating right now b/c I am losing a lot of picture right now to this virtual cropping. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!