Requested intelligent wallpaper customization

[riow]

There're really so many wallpaper changer in the market, but none of them offers real user customization to set wallpaper.

I always like to manually crop a big photo to set the specific portion to be wallpaper. But manually cropping is very difficult to fit for screen resolution. During the full screen view of a photo, user may press keyboard "+" "-" buttons to zoom and press arrows button to locate the specific portion of photo. At this time, this specific portion is the final wallpaper view. May I ask if Irfanview could offer a new keys combination at this moment to set the current view to be wallpaper? Due to the simple zooming quality using "+" "-" buttons, may a detailed quality of the current view could be offered like the quality of Ctrl+R?

Thanks!

[Mij]

I always like to manually crop a big photo to set the specific portion to be wallpaper. But manually cropping is very difficult to fit for screen resolution.

May I ask if Irfanview could offer a new keys combination at this moment to set the current view to be wallpaper?

Because of the menus and toolbars the "current view" is not quite the right shape to use for a full screen wallpaper.

It is not that difficult to set the selection box as you want it for cropping.
Adjust the view to show a little more than the area you want and draw a selection box somewhere near where you want it. Then press Shift+C to open Custom selection, select Actual Ratio of your screen (e.g 4:3) and Apply to image. That will adjust the box to the exact shape you want. You can resize the box without losing the shape by pressing Ctrl as you left click and drag a side or you can move the whole box around by right clicking as you drag.

[Skippybox]

To give you more area to make your adjustments, you can hide all the toolbars in window mode by pressing:

ALT+SHIFT+T
ALT+SHIFT+M
ALT+SHIFT+C
ALT+SHIFT+S

Then, press ALT+Space > Maximize to hide the taskbar. Now you should have a window that you can work in that almost resembles full screen!

If you really don't like Custom selection, despite its accuracy, then you have another choice. Try hiding everything like above, and press C (Capture). Set it to capture the full desktop area (1st option), without cursor, and output to viewer. Now, get the image the way you want it and press the hotkey. The new image will be captured as you saw it and will have a small border, due to the window. To get rid of the border, use Edit>Auto crop borders (CTRL+SHIFT+Y) until it is gone (you'll know when the scrollbars disappear!). Now, if you want, you can Resize it so it is the screen dimensions again. BTW, if you don't want your image replaced with the captured image, then use a second instance of IrfanView to do the capturing.

The great thing about working in window mode instead of full screen mode, is control. Since you can mimic full screen in window mode, you lose almost nothing, and gain so much, like editing capability. One benefit is the smoothness factor that you mentioned. Window mode supports resampled zooming, whereas full screen, unfortunately does not. You must have View>Display Options>Use Resample checked for this to work. This is great since it allows you to capture a smooth image, which you could not otherwise get in full screen.

[riow]

That's so great and nice of all of you here in this forum. I don't believe the function I'm looking for has already been here in Irfanview. I can get my desired wallpaper now!

Besides, without any selection to a 1190x862x24 photo, if I shift+C, I found that the selection will be selected automatically using the previous value 4:3 and 1024x768, but the size of the box is not 1024x768 after Apply to image. The box sizes 865x649 at the right bottom corner of the photo. May I suggest that the size of box could remain 1024x768 if the size of photo is large enough, so that user could drag the box at once without resizing again?

Thanks all of you here!

[Skippybox]

Yes, Custom selection is great for making selections from scratch, too. Since 1024x768 is already 4:3, you don't really need to have a ratio chosen.

Your issue with the incorrect selection size is actually probably debatable. One might appreciate the way the selection snaps to the borders of the image, rather than maintaining its size.

If you want to ensure this does not happen, then you just need to make sure that the position offset, doesn't place the selection off the image. To do this, you can enter 0 for the X- and Y-offsets in Custom selection. However, a faster method is to just press CTRL+A (select all) before SHIFT+C (custom selection). That way, both offsets will automatically be 0. Now, just choose from the list 1024x768, and apply. Your selection will appear in the upper left corner and be the fullly chosen size. The selection size appears in the caption (title bar) if shown.

Remember, if the image is not displayed 1:1, the selection will not always be perfect, because it selects screen pixels and not image pixels. Therefore, the resultant cropped image may be off by a pixel or so, vertically or horizontally. Keep this in mind.

[riow]

I'm happy with ctrl+A before shift+C which really does the job! Thanks Skippybox!!