What iOS calls a live wallpaper has changed thoroughly since 2015

What iOS calls a live wallpaper has changed thoroughly since Live Photos arrived in 2015, and the lock screen has been rebuilt around them more than once. Because the position keeps moving, the durable thing to describe is the mechanism rather than a version history: iPhone wallpapers are still images with one narrow exception, that exception is the Live Photo, and no third party app can install a moving background of its own. Wallpaper Engine is a Steam program that plays video and scene wallpapers on Windows, and it has no iOS version at all.

What iOS accepts as a moving wallpaper

iOS accepts three kinds of moving wallpaper, and only one of them comes from you. Apple's own animated and dynamic options ship with the system and cannot be added to. A Live Photo from your camera roll is the user supplied case, and it animates on wake rather than looping. Everything else sold as a live wallpaper for iPhone is an app that converts a video into a Live Photo, which you then set through the normal wallpaper screen.

The practical consequence is that a moving iPhone wallpaper is a brief animation tied to picking up the phone, not a continuously playing scene. A live wallpaper is a video your device never stops playing on Android and on Windows. On an iPhone it stops almost immediately, by design, which is also why the battery question is far smaller here than on the other platforms.

The two wallpaper slots, and making them different

Making the wallpaper and the lock screen different on an iPhone is not a trick, because iOS has two separate wallpaper slots and they can hold different images. The pair is edited together, so both images are chosen in the same place. What matters more than the mechanics is that the two slots have completely different constraints.

• Reserve the top of a lock screen image, because the clock sits there and nothing behind it survives.
• Reserve the bottom of a lock screen image, because the flashlight and camera buttons sit there.
• Expect Depth Effect to push the clock behind a clear foreground subject, and to refuse to engage on an image with no clear subject at all.
• Keep a home screen image even and low in contrast where the icon grid sits, since every icon carries a label that has to stay readable.
• Use the darker of your two images on the home screen, the one you look at for hours rather than seconds.

The size an iPhone wallpaper has to be

Work from the class rather than the individual model. Pixel counts shift slightly between generations of the same size class, so an older 6.1 inch phone such as the iPhone 13 is close to the standard class figure without being identical, and iOS crops the difference away. What you must not do is work from the points column. Points are what the system reports, pixels are what the panel has, and at 3x there are three pixels per point in each direction. A file built to 393 x 852 arrives at a third of the resolution it needed, which is the commonest reason a phone wallpaper looks soft.

Turning a GIF or a video into something an iPhone will take

To make a GIF wallpaper on an iPhone, convert the GIF to a Live Photo first, because iOS will not animate a GIF set as a wallpaper. Two things are worth knowing before you bother. A GIF holds only 256 colors, which destroys anime color specifically, since flat cel shading and soft gradients are exactly what a small palette handles worst. And the result plays on wake and then holds a still frame, so the frame the animation settles on matters more than the motion does.

The same applies to a dynamic wallpaper made from a video. Pick the still frame the loop rests on as carefully as you would pick a still wallpaper, because that frame is what you will be looking at almost all of the time.

A live wallpaper against a still design on a phone

A still design beats a live wallpaper on an iPhone on every measure except novelty, which is an unusual thing to be able to say. The still image costs nothing to display, is composed once for both the clock and the icon grid, and looks the same every time you pick up the phone. The Live Photo costs a brief animation on wake and then becomes a still anyway. On Android the trade is genuinely open, because the wallpaper keeps playing. On iOS the moving option is a flourish at the moment of unlocking, and worth choosing on that basis.

What makes a good iPhone wallpaper

A good iPhone wallpaper is one composed for a very tall frame, which almost nothing is. A 16:9 source scaled to fill a 9:19.5 phone screen has to be roughly 3.85 times as wide as the screen, so most of a landscape image is thrown away and what survives is a narrow vertical slice through the middle. Portrait sources, vertical illustrations and images with a strong central subject survive that, and wide scenes do not. The same picture is a different file on every device, and the gap between a desktop at 3840 x 2160 and a phone at 1290 x 2796 is the largest on the site.

The second half of a good wallpaper is whether it is yours to use. Free to download and free to use are not the same claim, and the picture most people want at this point is copyrighted artwork that no download button changes the status of. The images with no rights question at all are those a rights holder released with stated terms, those under an open license, those licensed from the artist, and those you made yourself.

Where to go next

DEVICESYour desktop, your phone and your tablet each want a different wallpaper fileWallpaper sizes by deviceWALLPAPER ENGINEWallpaper Engine is a Steam program that plays things on your desktopWallpaper Engine, explainedLIVE WALLPAPERA live wallpaper is a video your device never stops playingWhat it is and what it costsFREE TO USEFree to download and free to use are not the same thingWhere a free anime background actually comes from