Putting backgrounds on mobiles

[necroerotica]

Hi folks - does anyone have any advice as regards putting pictures onto a mobile phones 'wallpaper'? I have an oldish Sony Ericsson which has a usb cable, so file transfer is no problem.

Thing is, most of the pic's I have on my PC I've downloaded with the intention of displaying them on a PC screen - they tend to be .bmp's, and quite large.

So obviously I'll have to create 'shrunken' versions for my phone.

Can anyone advise me if there's tools to do that, things I should be looking for etc? Or do I just get a copy of Paintshop Pro and shrink the image down manually until it looks like it'll work?

 

[SweetErika]

Have you tried something like http://www.pix2fone.com/ ?

I just googled 'creating custom wallpaper cell phone' and found that, but it looks like there are other ways to do it as well.

And FYI, you don't need to buy a program to edit images. Irfanview and Gimp are completely free. Gimp is very Photoshop-like, if you're looking for a powerful image editor.

 

[Weird Harold]

Thing is, most of the pic's I have on my PC I've downloaded with the intention of displaying them on a PC screen - they tend to be .bmp's, and quite large.

So obviously I'll have to create 'shrunken' versions for my phone.

IrfanView Is The Answer

You need to check the documentation on your phone and determine what kindof images it will accept as bakground images. JPeG format is probably on that list so almost any image editing program that has "Save As" on the file menu can be used to re-save a copy as a JPeG file.

Converting to a compressed format won't necessarily "shrink" the image to be suitable for a phone's background image; you'll run into the same problem avatars have with "busy" images -- there just isn't enough room on a phone's screen for a lot of details

 

[necroerotica]

Excellent, many thanks for the answers. I'll have a tinker with those when I have the chance. I do realise that a lot of images simply won't work or look any good when they're smaller, but I figure that's just something I'll have to experiment with.

I just wondered if there was a standard method before I went and reinvented the wheel

 

[Weird Harold]

I just wondered if there was a standard method before I went and reinvented the wheel

There probably is a standard method -- for your particular phone's operating system. That's why they write documentation and help menus.

At one time, Windows would only accept BMP format for desktop background images. (wich is why it's officialy named "Windows Bit Map" format.) MS has added numerous acceptable formats for desktop imaages but it's still finite list of image formats that can be used -- rather like thevBulletin attachment function which will only accept six types of images: bmp gif jpe jpeg jpg, & png.

Your phone may have a list of acceptable image formats you have to adhere to, or you may have to experiment.