Respect Sakura

Chalk this one up as one of those “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” ideas. One of the biggest complaints with Windows Vista and multiple display setups is the issue of wallpapers. Especially if you’re like me, and have two displays of differing sizes - such as a 1360×768 (16:9) HDTV, and a 1920×1200 (16:10) 24″ LCD Monitor. Even with Vista Ultimate, and DreamScene’s “hidden” preserve aspect ratio setting, it still makes working with multiple displays a royal pain in the ass. Furthermore, not everyone has Ultimate, making wallpaper management simply impossible.

Well, today I can show you how to fix it without the need of expensive Vista editions, or third party shareware apps which may or may not be compatible with Vista. Ultimately, you’re going to need two things:

• Source material (I highly recommend perusing Neg’s blog for that)
• An image editor, such as Paint.NET.

So, now that you’re equipped - lets get started. The first step you need to do is calculate your entire desktop area. Now, I can calculate this the hard way, by working out that my first display is 1920×1200, knowing that my displays are on a horizontal axis (ie, not one above the other, just side by side), and deducing that 1920 + 1360 = a total area of 3280×1200…

…or I can just hit Print Screen, pasting the contents into Paint.NET (or your favourite image editing app), and not only get the exact dimensions, but a good idea of where you’re going to need to put all these crazy images. Ergo, when I hit Print Screen now, I wind up with this:

Now that we have our template image, all we need to do is obtain two images of the same size, paste them into this image and over the appropriate spots, and save the result as a .jpg file preferably in your Pictures folder, or somewhere where the desktop background control panel applet can read from. Why .jpg and not .png? Because for starters, the control panel applet doesn’t open .png files, and when you do the right-click-set-as-background deal, it defaults to using horrible, horrible low quality compression, meaning artifacts galore for people who use traces for wallpaper.

Now, with any luck, you should end up with something like the following:

So, that’s great and all, but now what do you do with it? Well, simply go into the Control Panel applet, find your wallpaper, and ensure you set the wallpaper as tiled, like the following:

Viola, you now have wallpapers that don’t suck!