How to change your Android phone’s wallpaper

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Published 10 Oct 2014

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Modern Android smartphones come with big, beautiful displays with high pixel density. y not show it off with some fresh wallpaper?

To start, navigate to your Settings app. Tap Display under the Device heading, then tap llpaper. You’ll get a list of folders of images to browse; tap one to view your options.

Each folder has a slightly different layout, which is a little annoying. For instance, tapping the llpapers option leads you to a gallery of sorts where you swipe through thumbnails that appear along the bottom of your screen. The ve llpapers folder shows a list of options, you can tap on one to preview. Meanwhile, the Gallery  otos folders show scrollable lists of thumbnails.

wallpaper picker
The wallpaper galley picker.

Once you find the wallpaper you like, setting that choice as your wallpaper is the same no matter what—you just tap Set wallpaper.

There’s another, perhaps easier way to get to your wallpaper settings on most Android devices. Tap–hold on a blank area of the home screen, avoiding all icons or widgets. After a couple seconds, you should get an option to change the wallpaper or add widgets.

Finding good wallpaper images

if your personal photos don’t make good wallpaper photos, check out wallpaper sites like Interfacelift  National Geographic’s wallpaper collection.

Flickr, Deviant Art, kimedia Commons are also good places to look. Many photographers artists who use those services provide downloadable public domain or Creative Commons-licensed versions of their photos. 

If the artist or photographer doesn’t explicitly offer a downloadable version, however, be a good citizen either ask for permission first, or look for something else. Don’t just swipe copyrighted images from the Internet. That’s just not cool.