An iPhone keeps the top and the bottom of your wallpaper for itself
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photographAnime wallpaper on an iPhone has to be built for a frame far taller than any artwork is drawn in, at the phone's native pixel size, which for a 6.1 in iPhone is 1179 x 2556 and for a 6.7 or 6.9 in Max is 1290 x 2796.
Two things then decide whether the picture looks right. The first is shape: an iPhone screen sits near 19.5:9, taller than any aspect ratio illustration is composed in, so a landscape image loses most of itself and a portrait image still loses the top and bottom. The second is that iOS keeps parts of the frame for itself. The lock screen reserves the top for the clock and the bottom for the flashlight and camera buttons, and the home screen puts icons over everything.
The pixel sizes for current iPhone classes
The pixel size to build to is the panel's native count, not the number in a specification chart's points column. iPhones render at 3x on the standard and Max classes, which means three pixels per point in each direction, so a file built to the point figure arrives at a third of the resolution it needed.
| Class | Native pixels | Points | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6.1 in standard | 1179 x 2556 | 393 x 852 | 3x |
| 6.7 and 6.9 in Max | 1290 x 2796 | 430 x 932 | 3x |
| SE, 3rd generation | 750 x 1334 | 375 x 667 | 2x |
Building slightly larger than the panel is safe and building smaller is not, because iOS scales up to cover the frame and an upscale on flat cel color is obvious. For one file covering both current classes, build to 1290 x 2796 and let the smaller phone crop it. An iPad is a third file again: an iPad Pro 11 in is 1668 x 2388. The same picture is a different file on every device you own.
Why a widescreen picture loses most of itself on a phone
A widescreen picture loses most of itself because the shapes are nowhere near each other. A 16:9 file is 1.778 wide for every 1 tall. A phone held upright is the reverse of about 19.5:9, so scaling the file to fill the height means the file has to be roughly 3.85 times as wide as the screen, and the vast majority of the picture ends up off frame. A desktop wallpaper at 1920 x 1080 is not a phone wallpaper that needs shrinking. It is the wrong shape, and no amount of resizing fixes a shape.
A phone wallpaper therefore has to be cropped on purpose, with the subject in the middle band, because the top and the bottom are where the system furniture lives. An ultrawide file is worse still, since a 21:9 or 32:9 image sits even further from the phone's shape.
Whether a 4K iPhone wallpaper is a real thing
No. 4K is 3840 x 2160, a landscape 16:9 resolution, and no iPhone panel is anywhere near it: the largest current class is 1290 x 2796, which is fewer pixels in total and a completely different shape. A file advertised as a 4K phone wallpaper is either a landscape 4K image that will be cropped to a sliver, or a portrait image labeled 4K because the word sells.
The label is reaching for a genuine idea, which is that the file should be at least as large as the screen. State that as the pixel count instead: 1290 x 2796 is exactly right for a Max class iPhone, and twice that in each direction is wasted storage on a screen that cannot show it.
The two slots: lock screen and home screen
iOS has two separate wallpaper slots, Lock Screen and Home Screen, and they can hold different images. This is why a picture can look correct when you unlock the phone and wrong on the lock screen, or the other way round: they are not the same file being displayed twice, they are two settings that happen to default to the same picture when you set one from Photos.
The lock screen is the harder of the two to compose for. The clock sits across the top of the frame at a size that changes with the style you pick, and the flashlight and camera buttons sit at the bottom corners. Anything you care about in a picture, a face most of all, belongs in the middle. Depth Effect will push the clock behind a foreground subject when the image has one, and will refuse to engage on images with no clear foreground, which includes most flat illustrated backgrounds.
Setting a GIF or a moving picture as an iPhone wallpaper
An animated GIF cannot be set as a moving iPhone wallpaper. The wallpaper slot takes a still image or a Live Photo, and a GIF placed there shows a single frame. To get motion on the lock screen you convert the animation into a Live Photo first, then choose it in the wallpaper picker and enable the live option for that lock screen style. The motion plays when you touch and hold the lock screen, not continuously.
That is a narrower kind of motion than the desktop equivalent. A live wallpaper is a video your device never stops decoding while it is on screen, and on a phone that means the GPU and the display stay awake whenever the home screen is visible. It draws nothing when the screen is off or an app is in front of it. There is no iOS version of Wallpaper Engine, the Steam program that plays animated wallpapers on Windows; a companion Android app exists, sold separately, and iOS has no equivalent.
Where an iPhone wallpaper you are allowed to use comes from
Finding the picture is the easy part, and the licensing is the part that decides whether you may use it. A picture saved out of a social feed such as Pinterest carries no license with it: the feed is a display surface, not a rights clearance, and the person who posted it frequently did not make it. Four categories of image are genuinely free to use.
- Released by the rights holder with stated terms, as Studio Ghibli did with a large set of stills on ghibli.jp from September 2020, free to use within the bounds of common sense.
- Openly licensed, where the specific Creative Commons terms decide what you may do.
- Licensed from the artist, which is the clean answer for anything commercial.
- Made by you, which is the only case with no rights question at all.
Read which Creative Commons license applies before cropping. BY needs credit, NC forbids commercial use, and ND forbids derivatives, and cropping a picture to 1179 x 2556 is a derivative, so ND artwork cannot legitimately be fitted to a phone. Fan art is its own trap: the artist owns their drawing, but the characters remain the rights holder's, so a fan artist cannot grant rights they never had. This site hosts no wallpaper files and has no gallery.