Mountain Lion Wallpaper Niggles

[Torquemada]

I've just taken delivery of a new 27" iMac.

On the whole I'm very happy with it, and Mountain Lion, but I do have one niggle.

My previous Mac had Snow Leopard, and that worked a lot better at tiling wallpapers. If it was a portrait wallpaper it would tile it about three times, if it was a landscape wallpaper, it would end up filling the screen, as it was nearly big enough anyway. The other tiles were only small round the edges. This is just what I wanted.

Mountain Lion seems to shrink the wallpaper when it's landscape size though, as though you always want to see multiple copies.

Does anyway know a way of tiling wallpaper in Mountain Lion without shrinking it, even if it means buying a wallpaper changer app?

 

[Ledgem]

Did the behavior really change? How large was the screen on your previous Mac, and what resolution were you running at? It's possible that OS X 10.8 isn't actually shrinking the image, and that the image is simply a smaller resolution than your current working resolution (even though the image was sufficiently large for your previous setup).

If you go to the System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver settings, there's a drop-down menu just to the left of your wallpaper preview. Have you tried some of the different options in order to get what you want?

(If my advice is completely off, then I apologize - it's not 100% clear to me what you're unhappy with, and what you're trying to achieve.)

 

[Torquemada]

It does seem it's shrinking it to me.

My old Mac ran with a 1920x1200 resolution, running Snow Leopard. If I had a picture that was 1000x1200 and set it to be tiled I would see roughly three copies of this picture which is what I wanted. If I had picture that was about 1800x1200 then this would be centred in the screen. The other tiles were on the side of the picture, but you could only see a small amount of them. Again, I liked this behaviour.

On my new Mac, which has a 2560x1440 resolution, running Mountain Lion. If I tile a picture that is 1000x1440, then (after a bit if fiddling), it does display about three times as before, but if I tile a larger landscape picture that's about 2000x1440 Mountain Lion seems to shrink it so it displays multiple times.

I'm guessing Apple thought people always wanted to see multiple tiles of a picture when they selected this option, and so coded it this way, but I preferred the old behaviour.