Background setting - cropping options

Question

When setting a wallpaper you can choose from tile, zoom, center, scale, fill or span options. What do they mean?

How scale option is different from zoom and span? I can't see the difference on any of my wallpapers.

Answer 1

This is going to be tricky to see but...

• Tile - tiles an image, like tiles on a floor, try a really small images, like 100x100. see for examples
• Zoom - Zooms on an image so that the largest dimension is now the largest dimension of the desktop. For example a 200x100 image on a 800x600 desktop would be zoomed to 800x400, leaving 200px of empty space.
• Fill - basically "scales" to the width of your monitor. Ignoring height. so if you have a 1000x1000 resolution and a 600x500 image, the image will be scaled to 1200x1000 and centered cutting off the top and bottom a bit.
• Span - is like Scale but across multiple monitors. So if you have 2 800x600s and a 1600x600 image you can "span" it across both monitors
• Center - is for undersized images (though larger one works) that place the image in the center of a single monitor.
• Scale - "resizes" the image. Making it exactly the same size as your desktop. So a 800x600 desktop will 'scale' a 900x200 image to exactly 800x600, and distortion be damned.

Sorry I can't provide samples other then tile, but the images depend strongly on your monitor. You should be able to easily see the options in effect if you use a seriously undersized and bad aspect ration image to test with.