{"id":37103,"date":"2022-09-22T15:48:09","date_gmt":"2022-09-22T19:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=37103"},"modified":"2022-10-14T14:47:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T18:47:44","slug":"customizing-ios-16-lock-screen-wallpaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/22\/customizing-ios-16-lock-screen-wallpaper\/","title":{"rendered":"Customizing iOS 16 Lock Screen Wallpaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Federico Viticci<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The customization we have in iOS 16 includes<\/em> wallpapers – and in fact goes above and beyond anything Apple ever offered for wallpapers on iOS – but that’s only one component of a larger system. A good way to think about it is the following: customizing the Lock Screen is now very similar to customizing your watch face on the Apple Watch.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

For the first time in the iPhone’s history, Apple is also letting you create your own gradient-based Lock Screen background with the new Color<\/strong> wallpaper. As someone who’s constantly on the lookout for these types of images – I even made a shortcut to create colorful gradients<\/a> for my devices – I am very<\/em> happy with this wallpaper. By default, you can choose from a set of 18 colors with the ability to set a different intensity level via a slider. However, you can pick any color you want by accessing the system’s color picker.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Federico Viticci<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

With iOS 16, Apple is also putting great emphasis on your photos as a means to turn the Lock Screen into a personal, beautiful space that is uniquely yours.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

At the top of the picker, you’ll find an Albums tab, a search bar that supports the same search features of the main Photos app, and a strip of filters for the kind of content that looks great as a Lock Screen wallpaper. You can filter your photo library by people, pets, nature, or cities. Note that these filters won’t show you all matching items from your library in chronological order: they will show you a subset<\/em> of featured photos for those categories.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The third way to use photos on the Lock Screen is also one of my favorite features of iOS 16. With the photo shuffle mode, you can make your Lock Screen shuffle through a set of photos on a regular interval during the day. This way, you won’t have to pick a single wallpaper for the Lock Screen, and you can treat yourself to multiple wallpapers without having to create multiple Lock Screens.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I was excited to have rotating photos on my Lock Screen, but in practice it’s been really frustrating. The interface is confusing and does not work well.<\/p>\n\n

First, it seems strange (and watchOS-like) that you have to pick the type of wallpaper (Photos, Photo Shuffle, Emoji, Weather, etc.) first and then can’t change it. If you start with Photos and add some widgets to customize it, you cannot go back and change to Photo Shuffle or a color. Instead, you have to create a new<\/em> wallpaper and then manually recreate your widget layout.<\/p>\n\n

Photo Shuffle doesn’t seem to actually shuffle on the chosen schedule, and it’s clunky to set up. What I want to do is designate an album in my iCloud Photo Library and then periodically update it from the Photos app. Instead, it’s limited to 50 photos, and I have to manually select them. There is a way to change the 50 later, by removing some of the photos and then adding more. The button to remove photos is a trash can, which seems like it would delete<\/em> them, moving them to Recently Deleted, which is like iCloud’s trash. However, fortunately, it only removes them from the list of selected photos. Whether or not I change the selected photos, each time I edit the wallpaper it takes a while to save, as if it’s processing all the photos again. Since the shuffling doesn’t work, and it feels like a lot of taps to remove an old photo and select another when I simply want to add a new photo that I just took, I’ll probably just switch to the Photos wallpaper (which always shows a single photo, despite its plural name). Then I can more easily manage the selection myself.<\/p>\n\n

Ged Maheux<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Why does iOS 16 force you to create an all new wallpaper set when you want to make a simple change to the Lock or Home Screen?<\/p>\n

Why does it treat these two screens as linked at the hip? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Andy Runton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It’s infuriating. You also can’t add just<\/em> dynamic home screens like weather without changing the lock screen. The UI constraints are baffling. The same is true with Watch OS 9. You can’t duplicate faces and you can only adjust a few colors. It makes zero sense.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Lee Bennett<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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At least (as I’ve discovered) I don’t have to wait for those LONG spinner icons to finish rendering the previews. If I’m not changing the home screen wallpaper, I can go ahead and tap the button to accept the lock screen changes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n