ios7-wallpaperiOS 7 is finally available for all iOS users ! I downloaded iOS 7 few hours ago and have played with it for a while. So far, everything is smooth, responsive and look good.

There is one little problem that I immediately realized after installing iOS 7: wallpaper. What happened to my custom (still) wallpaper from iOS6? After upgrading, the wallpaper still appear, but somehow iOS 7 zoomed it, making the quotes in my wallpaper partly cut. I searched everywhere, some people suggested to add 200 pixels, some other suggested “new resolution” for iOS7, I tried many, my quotes are still cut, my wallpaper is still being zoomed.

Took me a while to figure out this puzzle. So I thought I want to share with you. iOS 7 was designed with parallax wallpaper in mind, this weird zooming is the result of parallax effect because iOS 7 need to have some extra image to show when we tilt our phones, so it zooms our current wallpaper, showing only the inner area of our picture. To solve this, we need to edit our wallpaper by adding 20% width and 20% height. For example, iPhone 4S original screen resolution is 640×960, so we need to resize the image to 768×1152. Just resizing? Nope. You need to make sure that “the main content” of your image stays within the inner area of the picture. So we have a new “wallpaper” sized 768×1152, but the quotes in the image, or the heads in our photo, should stay within the 640×960 area in the middle.

Remember that my example is for iPhone 4S. iPhone 5 screen resolution is 640×1136, so the new wallpaper should be 768×1363. You can do the math for iPad’s screen resolutions.

We can also opt to stop using our “still” wallpaper and try the new-dynamic wallpapers. But I intend to keep using still wallpaper, mainly to save battery, but I also don’t really like animation gimmicks in my mobile device.

There is another trick to avoid making a new wallpaper at all. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and turn on the switch. This will stop parallax effect and bring back iOS6 behavior for wallpapers. This what I ended up doing and my custom wallpapers from iOS 6 looks exactly as I wanted.