Running XP home, I can change my background so that it will tile, stretch and
center using bitmaps, But I cannot tile or center using a .jpg. I want to
center a .jpg, size is 300KB. I cannot get a jpg to center and show the blank
color on the sides of the background that it does with a bitmap.

Is this a restriction of the video settings?

Any suggestions?

No, there's no built-in restriction on jpegs. In fact, just about all my
desktop backgrounds are jpegs.

If the dimensions of your image, in whatever format, do not match the
dimensions of your monitor (16:10, 16:9 or 4:3), the image won't fit
properly on your monitor. Windows tries to squeeze the image onto your
monitor as best it can, but the results often look odd. Centering the
image can have unintended results.

For best results, crop your image so that it has the same dimensions as
your monitor.
---
Leonard Grey
Errare humanum est

Newbie123 wrote:
> Running XP home, I can change my background so that it will tile, stretch and
> center using bitmaps, But I cannot tile or center using a .jpg. I want to
> center a .jpg, size is 300KB. I cannot get a jpg to center and show the blank
> color on the sides of the background that it does with a bitmap.
>
> Is this a restriction of the video settings?
>
> Any suggestions?

On 12 Oct 2009, =?Utf-8?B?TmV3YmllMTIz?= <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote in microsoft.public.windowsxp.customize:

> Running XP home, I can change my background so that it will tile,
> stretch and center using bitmaps, But I cannot tile or center
> using a .jpg. I want to center a .jpg, size is 300KB. I cannot get
> a jpg to center and show the blank color on the sides of the
> background that it does with a bitmap.
>
> Is this a restriction of the video settings?
>
> Any suggestions?

Using XP Pro, I can tile, center, or stretch jpg files just like I can
bmp files. Maybe it is a matter of your video system.

I like to use the freeware image viewer Irfanview. It can make any
image it can display into your desktop wallpaper. It also has one
additional option that Windows built-in wallpaper setter doesn't have:
it will stretch the image to it's maximum viewable size while keeping
the proportions. So, it will enlarge the image until the horizontal or
vertical dimension fills the screen and display the background color in
the remaining area.

Actually, Windows automatically converts jpg wallpapers to bitmaps and
stores them in the Windows folder. The problem you have may be with the
conversion process. To avoid problems, convert manually with IrfanView or
GIMP.

"Newbie123" wrote:

> Running XP home, I can change my background so that it will tile, stretch and
> center using bitmaps, But I cannot tile or center using a .jpg. I want to
> center a .jpg, size is 300KB. I cannot get a jpg to center and show the blank
> color on the sides of the background that it does with a bitmap.
>
> Is this a restriction of the video settings?
>
> Any suggestions?

[BMorearty]

Another option: if you don't like manually copying photos and cropping them to your monitor dimensions or if you'd like to fill the screen with part of the picture without distorting it or having color bars on the sides you can use something like Ducklet DeskPhoto, which I wrote. In 3 clicks from Windows Explorer it copies a photo to a temporary location (so your original doesn't get cropped) and crops it to fit your monitor dimensions and sets the desktop wallpaper. So you don't have to crop it by hand or load an image editor like IrfanView.

Ducklet DeskPhoto works with lots of image file formats, including .jpg and .bmp.