Multipicture Live Wallpaper for Android lets you avoid scrolling wallpaper
Android has a lot going for it when it comes to wallpaper, with live wallpaper that reads your battery percentage and things like that. This isn’t always a good thing, unfortunately, as some launchers have scrolling wallpaper as the only option for using images as wallpaper, which means that when you scroll from screen to screen the wallpaper shifts slightly. The problem is that images then gets spread out across screens, and the result is often that nice pictures look ugly because you won’t get the part of it that you wanted where you wanted. The image above is the template that my Galaxy tab 7.0 Plus forces me to use if I want to use a custom wallpaper on it. Aside from ruining the image by cropping it, cropping it also blows it up to where it’s blurry.
There are many ways of getting around this. Installing another launcher is one way. ADWLauncher EX is very popular and is one of the apps that are on sale for 10 cents right now (will be gone in a few hours). Personally I didn’t like it, and find that I like the stock TouchWiz one better. Luckily, there’s another way to get around this issue; Multipicture Live Wallpaper. What it does is simply add a live wallpaper to your device that you can customize with your own images. Nothing actually moves, but the live wallpaper system gives the app a way to let you customize the wallpaper to your liking. You can do what I did and set a single image as the wallpaper on all screens with no transitions, or you can customize more with different wallpaper on each screen/orientation, have transitions between them etc.
It’s a great app and does what it promises. If you’re using a launcher that has this issue, or just want to use different wallpaper for each screen, it’s definitely worth checking out. Best of all, it’s free in the Market (with the option to donate if you like it). Hit the jump to see the difference between the wallpaper after being run through the template cutter and when used in MLW.
[Android Market]
Left: maximum part of the image possible to show with stock template system. Right: same source image in MLW. What you can’t see is the pixelation/blurriness of the left image due to being blown up beyond its original resolution.