How to Change the Wallpaper of an Android Phone

Android Smartphones For Dummies

Wallpaper is one of the standard items controlled by your Android’s home screen menu. The home screen background can be decorated with two types of wallpaper:

Traditional: The wallpaper is chosen from a selection of still images. These images can be preloaded as wallpapers on the phone, or you can pluck an image from the phone’s gallery, such as a photo you’ve taken.
Live: The wallpaper image is animated, either displaying a changing images or reacting to your touch.

For your home screen

To set new wallpaper for the home screen, obey these steps:

Long-press the home screen.
Choose the Set Wallpaper or Wallpapers command or icon.
Choose the wallpaper type.

For example, choose Gallery to use a photo you’ve taken or Wallpapers to select a preset wallpaper design.

You may see a scrolling list of wallpaper options. The Pick Image option lets you use the Gallery or Photo app to choose an image. Live wallpapers may be shown in the list by name.
If prompted, choose the wallpaper you want from the list.

For selecting an image from the phone, you see a preview of the wallpaper. A cropping tool may appear, and you can select and crop part of the image.

For certain live wallpapers, a Settings icon appears. It lets you customize certain aspects of the interactive wallpaper.
Touch the Save, Set Wallpaper, or Apply button to confirm your selection.

The new wallpaper takes over the home screen.

Live wallpaper is interactive, usually featuring some form of animation. Otherwise, the wallpaper image scrolls slightly as you swipe from one home screen page to another.

Other options

You may also be able to change the lock screen wallpaper on some phones. For example, after Step 2 (in the preceding list), you may be prompted to select wallpaper for the home screen, the lock screen, or both.

The Settings apps may feature a Wallpaper command. Choose Display and then look for a Wallpaper command. Likewise, you might find a Lock Screen command on the Settings app’s main screen. Use it to set the lock screen’s wallpaper.

The Zedge app has some interesting wallpaper features. Check it out on the Google Play store.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.