Wallpaper Cropping

[Knightoftheapp]

I have an iPad 2 and have upgraded to iOS 7. Attached are two photos of the wallpaper I'm currently using. You'll notice the screen shots of the same photo in both portrait and landscape. The woman's head is cropped off at the top when the photo is in landscape mode. Is there any way to fix this? It's rather annoying. This did not happen in previous versions of iOS. Thanks for your help.

 

[willerz2]

I don't believe so as that's pretty much how it's coded. Unless there's more to the wallpaper where you can drag the center of it a little lower to expose more of the top of the wallpaper so that if you change orientations, it would still retain the upper portion of her head. The extremities of the picture are the areas to avoid on the iPad when it comes to wallpaper as they're almost guaranteed to cut off in one orientation or another. Or, try setting the wallpaper while in the landscape orientation and position it so that the head is shown. Then change it to the portrait orientation and see if that helps.

 

[Knightoftheapp]

There is a way to "move and scale" the photo when choosing the wallpaper you want to use, but you can only move the photo from side to side.

 

[twerppoet]

Not ideal, but if you zoom into the wallpaper using the pinch out gesture, you'll gain the ability to drag it up/down a bit. Finding a good balance between the loss of resolution in zooming and a decent looking crop of the wallpaper may not be possible. Due to the new parallax feature iOS 7 scales wallpapers differently. It has to. In the end some of your old wallpapers simply aren't going to work the way you want.

On the bright side, this means that wallpaper creators should be inspired to make a whole new batch of images optimized for iOS 7. They will likely be a bit larger, to make room for parallax, and keep the important bits away from the edges so they show properly.

Note: The pinch/zoom gesture tends to lag on older devices when adjusting wallpaper (like my iPad 3), so patience may be required. Apparently the iPad recomputes the parallax effect after each adjustment and this requires some time. If you wait until the effect is live in the preview before each adjustment things go a bit smoother.

 

[Knightoftheapp]

Not ideal, but if you zoom into the wallpaper using the pinch out gesture, you'll gain the ability to drag it up/down a bit. Finding a good balance between the loss of resolution in zooming and a decent looking crop of the wallpaper may not be possible. Due to the new parallax feature iOS 7 scales wallpapers differently. It has to. In the end some of your old wallpapers simply aren't going to work the way you want. On the bright side, this means that wallpaper creators should be inspired to make a whole new batch of images optimized for iOS 7. They will likely be a bit larger, to make room for parallax, and keep the important bits away from the edges so they show properly. Note: The pinch/zoom gesture tends to lag on older devices when adjusting wallpaper (like my iPad 3), so patience may be required. Apparently the iPad recomputes the parallax effect after each adjustment and this requires some time. If you wait until the effect is live in the preview before each adjustment things go a bit smoother.

I tried your "pinch & zoom" idea with no success. But I'll try it again. Perhaps it's just a matter of practice. You're brilliant! I never thought about the parallax factor. Another idea would be to crop the photo with a good photo editing app.

 

[twerppoet]

Cropping the photo before hand probably won't help with things like cut off heads. You'd need to do the opposite, add some boarders so that the head is no longer at the edge of the image.

 

[Gazzaho]

The simple fact is that they give us a useless piece of eye candy that, quite honestly is less than impressive visually, in the form of parallax.

It's like the wallpaper scaling is set to display the wrong axis of the picture, with IOS 6 a picture could be scaled to the top and bottom of the picture for portrait and landscape, in IOS 7 this scaling doesn't happen period. No matter how much I try moving, scaling or zooming in both directions it snaps to a centre point and displays that area alone. This cannot be a feature, and parallax in my view can't be the main culprit either, as from reading various posts, relating to the iPhone I may add some owners have claimed switching parallax off solved their wallpaper problem while others experienced no change.

The only way I have found to display a picture un-cropped in landscape is to reduce its size with an app like InstaSize until it displays top and bottom, but then it doesn't display in portrait. This is what I ended up with.

 

[Knightoftheapp]

The simple fact is that they give us a useless piece of eye candy that, quite honestly is less than impressive visually, in the form of parallax. It's like the wallpaper scaling is set to display the wrong axis of the picture, with IOS 6 a picture could be scaled to the top and bottom of the picture for portrait and landscape, in IOS 7 this scaling doesn't happen period. No matter how much I try moving, scaling or zooming in both directions it snaps to a centre point and displays that area alone. This cannot be a feature, and parallax in my view can't be the main culprit either, as from reading various posts, relating to the iPhone I may add some owners have claimed switching parallax off solved their wallpaper problem while others experienced no change. The only way I have found to display a picture un-cropped in landscape is to reduce its size with an app like InstaSize until it displays top and bottom, but then it doesn't display in portrait. This is what I ended up with.

Thanks.

 

[twerppoet]

The simple fact is that they give us a useless piece of eye candy that, quite honestly is less than impressive visually, in the form of parallax.

It's like the wallpaper scaling is set to display the wrong axis of the picture, with IOS 6 a picture could be scaled to the top and bottom of the picture for portrait and landscape, in IOS 7 this scaling doesn't happen period. No matter how much I try moving, scaling or zooming in both directions it snaps to a centre point and displays that area alone. This cannot be a feature, and parallax in my view can't be the main culprit either, as from reading various posts, relating to the iPhone I may add some owners have claimed switching parallax off solved their wallpaper problem while others experienced no change.

The only way I have found to display a picture un-cropped in landscape is to reduce its size with an app like InstaSize until it displays top and bottom, but then it doesn't display in portrait. This is what I ended up with.

I'm pretty sure the problem with snapping and zooming has to do with the fact that wallpapers optimized for iOS 6 are too small to take full advantage of iOS 7.

While the details differ, this is pretty much the same thing that happened when the retina iPad's came out. People found that their old wallpapers looked terrible. They had to find new ones if they wanted things to look as nice as possible. After a short time the market answered and there were a flood of new retina optimized backgrounds. I'm expecting the same to happen for iOS 7, only parallax optimized.

Personally, I have no favorite themes or subjects; so my attachment to a wallpaper is almost purely about whether it looks good but doesn't distract. When my old wallpaper didn't look good anymore, it was time to go find one that did. Sort of inconvenient, but also sort of fun. I don't wallpaper hunt often, but I enjoy tinkering around to see what looks good. With iOS 7 this is even more challenging/fun, since the wallpaper affects so much more of the interface's appearance.

 

[Gazzaho]

While the details differ, this is pretty much the same thing that happened when the retina iPad's came out. People found that their old wallpapers looked terrible. They had to find new ones if they wanted things to look as nice as possible.

I can't argue with you on any of your comments, but the wallpapers or photos I have were originally on my iPad 1, I then transferred them to my new retina iPad 4 with no problem until IOS 7 was released, they looked and scaled properly. If parallax is the true culprit it would be nice to have it confirmed by Apple. A lot of people do get attached to their favourites, I myself don't, but every picture I have on my device will not work the way it should.

I feel to make a change like this with no official explanation as to what is happening or how to correct it is unhelpful. An official explanation, even if it's only to say your original pictures may not scale properly due to the introduction of parallax would be better than absolute silence. They have to have made changes to the core wallpaper settings if simply turning off parallax doesn't correct the problem, as it stands now I wouldn't even know what size a picture has to be in order to make it scale properly. I'm sure some people out there have, through trial and error, figured it out but we shouldn't have to do it that way this is supposedly an intuitive device, it should either work or if not an explanation given on how to rectify it.

If there's a hard or easy way of doing things it's my impression that Apple always seem to choose the former rather than latter.

 

[Knightoftheapp]

I can't argue with you on any of your comments, but the wallpapers or photos I have were originally on my iPad 1, I then transferred them to my new retina iPad 4 with no problem until IOS 7 was released, they looked and scaled properly. If parallax is the true culprit it would be nice to have it confirmed by Apple. A lot of people do get attached to their favourites, I myself don't, but every picture I have on my device will not work the way it should. I feel to make a change like this with no official explanation as to what is happening or how to correct it is unhelpful. An official explanation, even if it's only to say your original pictures may not scale properly due to the introduction of parallax would be better than absolute silence. They have to have made changes to the core wallpaper settings if simply turning off parallax doesn't correct the problem, as it stands now I wouldn't even know what size a picture has to be in order to make it scale properly. I'm sure some people out there have, through trial and error, figured it out but we shouldn't have to do it that way this is supposedly an intuitive device, it should either work or if not an explanation given on how to rectify it. If there's a hard or easy way of doing things it's my impression that Apple always seem to choose the former rather than latter.

I think that what everybody should do is write letters to Apple and complain about this. Maybe then they'll change this in the next update. This is a stupid thing to have to deal with.

 

[J. A.]

I think that what everybody should do is write letters to Apple and complain about this. Maybe then they'll change this in the next update. This is a stupid thing to have to deal with.

Submit your feedback here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

 

[twerppoet]

. . .If there's a hard or easy way of doing things it's my impression that Apple always seem to choose the former rather than latter.

Well, it could hardly be 'always' or the iPad would be unusable.

Still, Apple operates under the mandate of making things so simple anyone can use them. It causes some blind spots when it comes to preparing people for change. That and their extremely cautious (paranoid even) approach to the media means they don't say anything until they are absolutely sure what went wrong and how they are going to deal with it.

In this case, I expect them to say nothing, ever. How people would feel about suddenly finding their favorite wallpapers looking bad probably never occurred to them. After all, they supplied some really nice ones, for free. But, even if they see it now, they will (probably rightly) realize that it will blow over fairly quickly, and that there is little they could do after the fact except trigger a media circus.

None of which addresses your frustration. If I could do that, I would. All I can do is put my two cents in on the subject and hope it helps either point the way forward, or at least help you to take it a bit more philosophically.

I think someone pointed out the iPad feedback page earlier in the thread, or perhaps it was a different one. I'll post it again, just in case. Feedback isn't very satisfying, but it's all we have to work with. Well, that or take our money elsewhere, and despite Apple's sometimes irritating ways they still make the better device and OS for what I want to do.

Apple - iPad - Feedback

Don't let the little things ruin your day.

 

[Gazzaho]

twerppoet, I understand all you've said. I have posted to Apple feedback, the second day after installing IOS 7. When I mentioned "always" I meant generally speaking, the hard way is when you can't simply connect you're iPad to a printer, any printer, either by Wi-Fi or by USB to print for example. Instead you have to use a kludge known as an app if you can find one that exists for your printer, I feel a lot of apps simply wouldn't exist if things were done the easy way.

Don't get me wrong I do like my iPad, I choose to buy an iPad 4 over an Android device even knowing the limitations of the OS from my previous one. and some aspects of IOS 7 are better, I like the new way of shutting down background apps myself, although again no explanation was given on how to achieve this, I had to use google in order to find you swipe upwards on the app picture, my overall impression of it though is one of disappointment and a step in the wrong direction.

The little things don't ruin my day twerppoet, but the annoying little things are beginning to accumulate to a stage where the next tablet I own may have an Android rather than an Apple OS.

 

[twerppoet]

No problem.

The printer problem for mobile devices is a huge cluster, and it's mostly because printing for computers has never been standardized. Instead of getting together and working out something nice and simply, every manufacturer has chosen to pursue their own standard, and build their own printer drivers for each major OS. Printing only looks easy on computers because they come with a huge number of printer drivers pre-installed, and software designed to go online and access an even larger database of priner drivers when that fails. It's a brute force method ill suited to the tighter resources of a mobile device. Especially when you consider that a computer only has to identify a few local printers. For a mobile device to have truly mobile printing it would need access to almost any printer driver made.

Adding mobile OS's to this mix is just doubling tripling (iOS, Android, Windows) the number of printer drivers that manufacturers need to create and distribute. This way of doing things needs to stop.

Apple's answer was to create the AirPrint standard and convincing a lot of manufacturers to adopt it. It does not support older printers, but for the printers it does support it will find and print to them without any extra special software or apps. It's not perfect, but that's Apple's answer for now, a standard.

Of course Apple is not the only one trying to fix this problem. HP introduced e-print. Google has their own printing solution. Etc. None of them agree on what the standard should look like, and, of course, there's money involved so. . .

So, like all standards past, we, the consumer are stuck with a fragmented set of solutions until either someone wins, or sanity breaks out.

Anyway, sorry for breaking out in more rambling.

Besides the apps you mentioned here are your printing choices for the iPad, in case you were not aware of a few. The pasted post is a bit out of date, but still close enough for a starting point. I really should take the time to update it.

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Some printers are directly compatible with AirPrint on the iPad. If you want this feature, be absolutely certain the printer supports AirPrint before buying. Some printers may require a firmware update to work. These are usually available on the manufacturers site. If you get this kind of printer you can print directly from within apps that support the feature, which is many.

AirPrint Basics

Of course some of us already have printers and do not want to buy a new one. There are several ways to do this.

One is to use a printing app on the iPad.

Most (or all) printing apps can only print pictures and/or files that have been copied to that app via Open In or another method. Several printer manufacturers have their own apps for their printers. In general those apps will probably have the best results, quality wise.

Another method is to load a program on the computer that will emulate an AirPrint compatible printer. Your computer must be on and have the printer available to it. The cheapest (free) is Airprint Activator. More features can be had with FingerPrint (mac and windows) and Printopia (mac only).

Printopia - Ecamm Network
FingerPrint - Collobos Software
How to Install AirPrint Activator for Windows?

A few printers (mostly HP's again) can be set up with their own email address. PDF attachments can be sent via this address to be printed. The last review I saw (many months ago) said it could be quite slow (big files not recommended), and sometimes the emails got lost and never printed. The advantage was that you could literally send/print from anywhere you have an internet connection.

For small business owners and those with more than one printer who would like all their printers to work, but don't want to leave a computer on all the time. The Lantronix XPrintServer is a small box that connects to your network and is supposed to detect and make all your wireless printers available to iOS as AirPrint printers. I haven't seen a full review on it yet, so do your research.

Some NetGear router models support NetGear Genie, which will add AirPrint support for printers on your network. If the printer is not wireless, it must be shared on the network, and the computer it is connected to must be on.