Guide to Changing Your iPhone’s Lock Screen Wallpaper

Although changing the image displayed when your iPhone is locked is easy, there is a little more to it if you don’t want to use a standard image or one that you’ve taken with the iPhone’s camera. Here is our guide to getting your lock screen wallpaper exactly as you want it.

Using Standard Images.

This is the easiest way of personalising your lock screen.

• Press Settings.
• Then Wallpaper.
• If you select Wallpaper again, you will be presented with the pre-loaded Apple pictures. Press the one you like to see a preview, then hit Set if you want to keep it.
• If you press Camera Roll instead of Wallpaper, you’ll see all the pictures you’ve taken with your camera. Again, tap one you want to preview and then tap and drag to centre the image, or pinch to zoom in and out. When you’re happy with the result, press Set.

That’s it as far as the standard Apple images are concerned, but what if you want to use a picture that isn’t already on your iPhone? What then?

Using Images Stored on Your Computer.

If you’ve got a picture you’ve taken, or have an iPhone wallpaper downloaded from the Internet, the first thing to do is make sure it’s the correct size for the screen. The iPhone has a resolution of 320×480, so use an image editor to either resize your picture or crop it down to this. It’s easier to do this on your computer and will give a better result than moving and scaling it once the picture is on the phone. It will also take up less memory on your phone.

If the picture is designed to be used as wallpaper for the iPhone, then chances are it will be the required size already.

With the resizing completed, store the picture in a folder you know the name of and its location on your PC, as you’ll need to recall it soon. Now we need to transfer your new wallpaper to your mobile.

• Connect your iPhone to iTunes via the USB sync cable.
• Once syncing is complete, make sure you select your iPhone in the iTunes menu and click the Photos tab.
• The information here will probably be greyed out at this time, but we’re going to change that. Tick the box marked Sync Photos From:, then select ‘Choose Folder‘ from the drop-down menu.
• Now you need to direct iTunes to the folder where you stored your new wallpaper. If you only want certain pictures from the folder, you can pick and choose by checking Selected Folders instead of All Photos.
• With this done, click Apply and your pictures will sync to your phone.

With the new pictures on your iPhone, you’ll want to set one as your lock screen wallpaper, here’s how:

• Just like setting the standard images, press Settings and Wallpaper.
• Now there is a third option, named Photo Library. Tap this.
• Your synced pictures should be displayed, so tap the one you want to use, move or scale it as before, then tap Set.

Wallpaper Apps.

There is another way to easily change your lock screen wallpaper by downloading a wallpaper application from the App Store. A simple search for the term ‘wallpaper’ returns several pages with apps promising pictures of everything from zombies and anime to horses and fireworks.

Most have a price tag attached, but there are some listed for free, however to beware that several of these will require either a website registration or an in-app purchase after a few free downloads.

Now you should be able to change the image on your lock screen to whatever you like, no matter where the image is stored. Have fun!