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Wallpapers

Wallpapers

A wallpaper sits behind a dashboard’s tiles: a picture of your own or one from the web, or a scene that moves and knows day from night.

A wallpaper

With Pro, a dashboard can show a picture of your own behind its tiles. Open Dashboard settings… › Look and choose Choose… under Wallpaper: it opens your pictures, where you pick one or Upload… a new one (PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 10 MB). From Tiledash has calm pictures made for this, wide ones and upright ones for phones, that anyone can use. These are the same pictures a custom tile or a tile’s background uses, and they stay with your account: Settings › Pictures lists them.

  • A picture from the web: switch Picture from to Web address, as on a tile’s picture, and paste a picture’s address (it starts with https://) for each screen size, then Load. Nothing is copied to Tiledash: every screen that shows the dashboard loads the picture from that site, on share links and paired screens too, so it changes or goes when the site changes it. One kind for the whole wallpaper: switching back to Your picture takes the web pictures away. A picture from the web has no scene behind it, since Tiledash can’t tell whether its sky is empty; effects, dim and blur work as with your own.
  • Desktop, Tablet and Phone: each has a picture field. Desktop’s picture shows on every size until another size gets one of its own, such as a photo taken upright for a phone (the library opens on upright pictures for it). Removing a size’s own picture shows Desktop’s there again. A wall panel shows the picture of the size it shows.
  • Fit: Fill the screen crops the picture to cover it; Whole picture shows all of it on the theme’s background.
  • Dim fades the picture towards the theme’s background (darker on a dark theme, lighter on a light one) so the tiles stay readable. Blur softens it.
  • Tiles keep their own background. To let the wallpaper show through a tile, lower its background’s opacity in its style. Glass themes blur what’s behind their tiles anyway.
  • The picture stays put while a long dashboard scrolls.
  • It shows in the app, on share links and on paired screens. E-ink screens leave it out.

A living wallpaper

A wallpaper can also move, slowly and quietly, and look different at night.

  • Scene: a scene moves slowly behind the tiles. Landscapes: Sky is a painted sky with clouds drifting by during the day, and a moon, twinkling stars and now and then a shooting star at night; Dunes puts soft rolling dunes in front of that sky. Abstract: Waves (slow flowing wave forms), Silk (drifting ribbons) and Glow (soft drifting colour), in your theme’s colours or a colourway you pick under Colours (Dusk, Ocean or Sand, which deepen at night).
  • A scene and a picture together: a scene shows behind a picture only when the picture has an empty, see-through sky, like one made with AI. A photo that fills the screen would hide it, so with one the scenes are greyed out, and picking one turns a scene off (the settings say so). The same goes for a picture from the web.
  • Effects float over any wallpaper, your own photo too: Live weather shows what the weather does where your Homey is (rain, snow, mist, lightning, clouds, and stars on a clear night, and a Sky scene greys under cloud); Clouds, Rain, Snow, Mist and Stars at night show all the time.
  • Day and Night: switch to Night above the picture fields to pick the pictures for the night, per screen size. Without a night picture, the day one shows at night too.
  • Night starts: With the theme shows the night with a dark theme, the day with a light one. At sunset shows it from sunset to sunrise where your Homey is, whatever the theme. Day and night fade into each other.
  • Slow pan: the picture drifts gently, as a camera panning would.
  • Make one with AI…: describe a view in a few words (“a Dutch polder with a windmill”), choose its look (painted, photo or watercolour), wide or upright, and its sky. With The living sky it is painted without a sky, so the moving sky shows behind it; Its own sky makes a whole picture. It paints a day picture and the same view at night, in about a minute, and adds both to your pictures; Use it puts them on the wallpaper. It costs 2 credits, the same credits as house pictures (in packs under Settings › Plan), which you get back if it fails. Your description is sent to OpenAI to paint it.

Everything in a scene or an effect moves smoothly or not at all: a screen that can’t keep up, such as a small wall panel, moves less of it, and Reduce motion (in This screen, or your device’s own setting) keeps it still.

Back on Free, a wallpaper is kept but not shown, anywhere, until you have Pro again. You can still remove it.

The theme’s background

Some themes draw a background of their own behind the tiles, such as a pattern or a slowly moving scene (Background in a theme of your own). It shows on a dashboard without a wallpaper, on Free too, and a wallpaper goes over it. To leave it out on one dashboard, turn off The theme’s background at the top of Look.