Create tiny cool looking wallpapers

Wallpapers are highly popular as they change the default look of an operating system's desktop. It is like adding custom photos or paintings to your home.Wallpapers come in all sizes and shapes but have one thing in common: they are usually image files that have a size of more than 100 Kilobyte and nowadays often more than a Megabyte.

This is probably not a problem for most new computers but when you have a old machine you may want to fight for every byte of Ram that you can save somewhere. The alternative to those wallpapers are tiny wallpapers that have the exact same effect. Sure, they do not show objects or people but they are still nice to look at, especially nicer than the solid color that you get if you do not pick a wallpaper at all.

All you need to do is create a tiny image with the width and height of 2 pixels. Fill those pixels anyway you like and save the image as bmp. Now select the image as your wallpaper and make sure you select center and stretch wallpaper to fill the whole screen with it.You can also use other sizes like a size of 3*3, 4*4 or even 10*10 if you prefer those. This makes it possible to create even better gradients.

The above two images are examples of my desktop after applying the new wallpapers. Both have a size below 1K. I read about this before but used a forum thread at the donation coder website as reference.

You can use Microsoft Paint for the generation of the wallpapers or any other image editor that lets you create new small images and supports the bmp file format. I have tested the method under newer versions of Windows, namely a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional and found it to work just as well under that operating system. Just make sure you select stretch as the option for the wallpaper.

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