It can be annoying when you set a perfect picture as your wallpaper and your device decides to cut some part of the picture off.
This is one of the features users are not quite satisfied with on iOS 7. iOS 6 allows you to pinch and zoom the wallpaper the way you like and you’re free to adjust it just the way you want. This is not the same on iOS 7 as the OS assumes it knows what’s best for your device.
Why is this happening?
To find the solution, you need to first understand the problem. Have you noticed that when you tilt your iPhone or iPad in certain ways, the wallpaper seems to move? This is one of the things the parallax effect does. The OS needs to create some sort of padding and make the image still fit outside the screen to make room for the parallax effect.
iPad users may notice that this problem is more pronounced on the iPad. Apart from the parallax effect, iOS 7 tends to strike a balance between landscape and portrait modes. It stretches the wallpaper in a way that it fits the screen at both orientations.
This can make your wallpaper look pixelated in some cases and believe me, it can be annoying
How to stop automatic wallpaper zooming on iOS 7
There are about three ways to fix this:
1. Turning On Reduced Motion: To do this, you only need to change some settings. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduced Motion. Turn on Reduced motion and this reduces the zoom effect noticeably.
However, you should note that the transition effect you see when switching between apps may be gone once you turn on “Reduced Motion”.
2. Disable Parallax Effect (Jailbreak needed): It’s possible to disable parallax without losing your animated transitions. Install HiddenSettings7 from Cydia and the Parallax enaBlur.
Access Springboard Settings from Control Center > Parallax > Turn off Parallax.
3. Using the right image dimension: Another easy fix is resizing your photo on a PC to the right dimension. Of course, you need to know how to use an image editing tool to do this. The right dimensions for different devices are given below:
- iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPod touch 5th gen – 1136 x 640
- iPad Air, iPad 4, iPad 3, iPad mini with Retina display – 2048 x 1536
- iPad 2, original iPad mini – 1028 x 768
- iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 – 960 x 640
You should note that this works best only if you’ve turned off parallax through reduced motion as explained in the first fix or second fix.
4. Wallpaper Applications: If you don’t wanna go through the trouble of resizing you photos manually, turning off parallax completely or tampering with your settings, there are several applications available on the App Store to fix automatic wallpaper scaling on iOS 7. Some of them include:
- Wallpaper Fix ($0.99)
- Wallax ($0.99)
- Fix My Wallpaper ($0.99)
- Background Optimizer for iOS7 (Free)
Some of these apps are not available for free but they work quite great. Got a better way to do this? Feel free to share.
