iPhone iPhone 6 Plus Wallpaper Dimensions

[Daremo]

And what would that difference be?

You cannot create an image in low res and expect it to display in HD. Images ghouls ALWAYS be created at the highest DPI and size possible, covering yourself for ANY medium you may want to use it for. You simply can't upscale a small, low Dpi image and expect it to look good. If you approach design from a print side, wanting to use the image for web, then DPI matters. MOST people who don't do design for a living will be very confused by this notion of resizing and resampling.

OK, I guess my wording was incorrect. DPI doesn't matter for web viewing, but it certainly matters for creation of the HD image. It works in relation to the canvas size. If you crate a large canvas at 72 DPI, or a small canvas at a high DPI, it's the same thing. People need to understand the relationship and difference between the two. The article confuses that a bit even when it tries to explain it.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying it's not entirely accurate to say DPI doesn't matter. People will misunderstand that, unless they know about relative size. We live in a world where everyone person with a pirated copy of Photoshop fancies themselves a graphic designer. It's made my life a living hell for many, many years. I've been a designer and ran a commercial print shop pre-press department for 25 years. It's people misunderstanding how it works it a annoyance, especially when your expected to make HD out of web images.

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I tried that as well. Still blurry. And it zooms in when you turn it over to landscape mode. Which it doesn't do with Apple's images.

You are correct. The iPhone 6 zooms in on the image when rotated. It doesn't handle background images the same as the iPad, so I believe the square theory for res is wrong, just because of the handling. Setting the wall paper in landscape mode first doesn't fix that. it doesn't even allow you to do that.

 

[jwhazel]

You cannot create an image in low res and expect it to display in HD. Images ghouls ALWAYS be created at the highest DPI and size possible, covering yourself for ANY medium you may want to use it for. You simply can't upscale a small, low Dpi image and expect it to look good. If you approach design from a print side, wanting to use the image for web, then DPI matters. MOST people who don't do design for a living will be very confused by this notion of resizing and resampling.

I do work in design for a living and even then you're confusing me. Digital images that stay digital (don't get printed) are dpi agnostic. Doesn't matter whether it's a web graphic or an HD wallpaper or a vector file. A size of 2800x2800 is the same size whether it's 1 dpi or 72dpi or 30000dpi. I don't know of anyone who designs for digital only and complicates the process by working backwards by defining an inch value for the canvas and the trying to figure out the dpi to get it to scale to a specific pixel size. Yes of course we want to start out with the highest size possible to avoid resampling, but dpi never factors in to this (because it's a metric used for print). I didn't see anything incorrect in the linked article other than it was a little too wordy.

As for the wallpaper issue, this thing is maddening. As far as I can tell, parallax adds 400px to each dimension (200 for each side). I've tried both 2608x2608 and 2608x1642 and no luck.

 

[jwhazel]

Alright, so i dug deeper into this mystery and extracted 2 of the apple wallpapers from my 6+: the night time purple milky way one (default wallpaper) and the underwater rays. Damian was right, the wallpaper is 1:1 square ratio for landscape mode. Purple milky way is 2706x2706 and underwater rays is 2592x2592.

How I did it:
You can use a freeware program called iPhone Backup Extractor to read backups out of iTunes. From a backup, select "iOS files" and dump the whole structure.You can navigate to /library/springboard to see 2 files... HomeBackground.cpbitmap and LockBackground.cpbitmap. A cpbitmap appears to be a very primitive form of 24-bit raster bitmap image with 24 bits tacked onto the end to represent some arbitrary file data such including predefined length and width. I wrote a simple python script below that reads the data.

#!/usr/bin/python
import struct
import sys
if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "Error: no filename given\n";
    sys.exit(0)
cfile = sys.argv[1]

with open(cfile) as f:
    contents = f.read()
    p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p6 = struct.unpack('<6i', contents[-24:])
    print "param 1: ", p1
    print "height is: ", p2
    print "width is: ", p3
    print "param 4: ", p4
    print "param 5: ", p5
    print "param 6: ", p6

 

[rwkleinjr]

Alright, so i dug deeper into this mystery

Intriguing... nice work!

Keep us posted on any further findings. Looking forward to designing wallpapers that behave properly.

 

[jwhazel]

So the consensus seems to be that Apples official wallpaper specs are 2706x2706.I dumped 8 of them (milky way purple, milky way blue, purple flower, green gradient, leaf, mountains, underwater rays, dark sand) and all except for underwater rays were that size.

However... there appears to be a bug in the wallpaper app on the phone in iOS 8.0.2. When using a custom wallpaper... no matter what image you set it as, no matter what size or ratio, it resizes down to some arbitrary value. Both 2706 x 2706 and 4800x 4800 goes down to 1242x692. Smaller than 2706^2 will result in close but even smaller values. This is why custom set wallpapers look blurry and zoom in on landscape rotate, because the wallpaper app crops and resizes them when you go to set it. See my post above on how to test this for yourself. I don't have any clue on a way around this.

 

[zigadeboo]

Confused

So I just grabbed this wallpaper from the 6 Plus Wallpaper thread and threw it on my phone just to try this out. The dimensions for this are 2662x2662, it would seem that the only way this would view correctly would be in landscape not portrait. Or am I missing something here?

 

[jwhazel]

So I just grabbed this wallpaper from the 6 Plus Wallpaper thread and threw it on my phone just to try this out. The dimensions for this are 2662x2662, it would seem that the only way this would view correctly would be in landscape not portrait. Or am I missing something here

In theory you would want enough padding around the edges so the subject would be cropped to the center in either orientation. See Damien's post on first page to see how that works.

In practice it (currently) doesn't matter because iOS is zooming and cropping whatever you choose. So best bet would be to crop it 16:9 the way you want to see it in portrait with the full subject in frame and just deal with the shoddy landscape zooming.

 

[Damian.]

So the consensus seems to be that Apples official wallpaper specs are 2706x2706.I dumped 8 of them (milky way purple, milky way blue, purple flower, green gradient, leaf, mountains, underwater rays, dark sand) and all except for underwater rays were that size.

However... there appears to be a bug in the wallpaper app on the phone in iOS 8.0.2. When using a custom wallpaper... no matter what image you set it as, no matter what size or ratio, it resizes down to some arbitrary value. Both 2706 x 2706 and 4800x 4800 goes down to 1242x692. Smaller than 2706^2 will result in close but even smaller values. This is why custom set wallpapers look blurry and zoom in on landscape rotate, because the wallpaper app crops and resizes them when you go to set it. See my post above on how to test this for yourself. I don't have any clue on a way around this.

Did they fix this in iOS 8.1 (1st or 2nd) Beta?
Can anyone check this?

 

[lucansmiles]

Did they fix this in iOS 8.1 (1st or 2nd) Beta?
Can anyone check this?

I can confirm the issue is fixed in iOS 8.1
I can't say anything about the landscape issue though, since I'm on a regular iPhone 6

 

[just1]

@ jwhazel
Hi ! Could you help me ?
I'm searching for this official wallpaper for iPhone 6 Plus :

It's included in iPhone 6 Plus, but I would like to modify it.

I read you can extract it.
Could you please, extract it for me in 2706x2706?

Thanks !

(PS : sorry if my english is not good, I'm french )

 

[jwhazel]

@ jwhazel
Hi ! Could you help me ?
I'm searching for this official wallpaper for iPhone 6 Plus :
Image

It's included in iPhone 6 Plus, but I would like to modify it.

I read you can extract it.
Could you please, extract it for me in 2706x2706?

Thanks !

(PS : sorry if my english is not good, I'm french )

Here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwjR_hNfdDPPQUZmbm1NRWQ3Y2c/view?usp=sharing

Image is in uncompressed Tiff. Note that there is a transparent six pixel column on the right side you'll need to crop out (I'm not clear why this shows up in some of the wallpapers).

 

[Jeff Chen]

I can confirm the issue is fixed in iOS 8.1
I can't say anything about the landscape issue though, since I'm on a regular iPhone 6

iOS 8.1 still has the problem. Nothing has changed.

 

[lucansmiles]

iOS 8.1 still has the problem. Nothing has changed.

I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been. The issue that wallpapers don't really work in landscape mode on an iPhone 6 Plus I can't say anything about since I don't own an iPhone 6 Plus but I have noticed that at least the resizing stopped. I can now set high-quality wallpapers without them getting pixellated. This is what I meant has been fixed, at least for me.

 

[Jeff Chen]

I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been. The issue that wallpapers don't really work in landscape mode on an iPhone 6 Plus I can't say anything about since I don't own an iPhone 6 Plus but I have noticed that at least the resizing stopped. I can now set high-quality wallpapers without them getting pixellated. This is what I meant has been fixed, at least for me.

Thanks for clearing that up. Apple really need to look at the landscape problem... It's getting to my nerves

 

[BergerFan]

Yeah, the zooming in, when turned to landscape is really annoying. I have a collection of awesome Retina iPad wallpapers that I would to love to use on my 6 Plus, but I dont, because of the zooming issue.

 

[Chaka Jon]

I've been having the same issue on my 6+. The black pin-dots that was included in iOS 7 appear to be smaller on the bigger phone. And when you turn it to landscape, it appears the same.

However, the same official wallpaper that was released last year, appears bigger. I've created a lock screen with my logo that I want to use (had it on my iPhone 5), but I want the dots to match in size.

Can someone please extract it from 6+. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to make this work.

Thanks.

 

[jecowa]

Any word on parallax dimensions for iPhone 6 (not Plus) ?

iPhone 6:
Accounting for the parallax feature, wallpaper for iPhone 6 should be 1592 x 893.

iPhone 6 Plus:
Accounting for the parallax feature, landscape mode, and down-sampling, wallpaper for the iPhone 6 Plus should be 2592 x 2592.

iPhone 5/5s/5c:
Accounting for the parallax feature, wallpaper for any of the iPhone 5 models should be 1392 x 744.

 

[Fatboy71]

This thread might be of interest re the dimensions.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1817236/

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Not fixed in 8.1.1 either. So, for right now, for anyone that thinks they know the right resolution, it won't be able to be checked until iOS displays rotated wallpaper correctly.

 

[CMSawall2]

Not fixed in 8.1.1 either. So, for right now, for anyone that thinks they know the right resolution, it won't be able to be checked until iOS displays rotated wallpaper correctly.

hopefully there is a fix, because the zooming in on landscape view gets rather annoying.

 

[BergerFan]

If you're jailbroken, there's a tweak called Notate, which simply stops the Homescreen rotating to landscape.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

hopefully there is a fix, because the zooming in on landscape view gets rather annoying.

Especially when Apple's wallpapers rotate so nicely...

 

[CMSawall2]

Hmm still no fix on this, we need to report this apple.

 

[stinnick]

proper size and resolution?

Maybe I am missing something because it's been a while since I have made iPhone backgrounds.
But dpi is indeed for print - it stands for dots per inch, however their is an equivalent here - ppi. Pixels per inch.
I created a background that was 2208 px by 2208 px with a ppi of 400 and it seems fine to me.
Please correct me, though, if I am doing something wrong... as I'd like to have my background function properly,.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Maybe I am missing something because it's been a while since I have made iPhone backgrounds.
But dpi is indeed for print - it stands for dots per inch, however their is an equivalent here - ppi. Pixels per inch.
I created a background that was 2208 px by 2208 px with a ppi of 400 and it seems fine to me.
Please correct me, though, if I am doing something wrong... as I'd like to have my background function properly,.

Create a wallpaper with a small object in the middle of that resolution.
1) If the size was natively supported, the wallpaper would center itself and you wouldn't need to move it around. What you should find is that the image is not in the middle, but you're looking at the upper right of it. Having to move it around means that there's no way to create a pixel perfect wallpaper that will display on everyone's phone the same way.
2) Even if you manually place the wallpaper where you want it, when you rotate the phone to landscape orientation, instead of the image simply rotating, the phone will zoom in. Apple's own wallpapers just rotate with no zooming, that's what everyones looking for.

For now the two resolutions to know about for iPhone 6 Plus are:

1242 x 2208 - Native resolution. Yes the screen is 1080, but if you create a wallpaper at 1080, the iPhone scales it up before displaying. So, you get that rescaling, then the rescaling for displaying that image. Best to just do it at the native resolution so that there's only one scaling happening.

1398 x 2592 - Parallax supported resolution.
If you have Parallax turned on, when you try to set an image that has this resolution, you won't have to move it on that screen, just set it and everything should line up fine. I got the number from wallpaper.sc BUT have done some testing on my own templates and it works just like I'd want it to. I can even draw a rectangle of 1242 x 2208 on top of a black background of this resolution and the edges of the rectangle perfectly wrap around the screen.

Still waiting on being able to rotate a square wallpaper that doesn't zoom in, though. Wallpaper.sc has posted 2592 x 2592 images, but they don't line up like I'd expect.