How to make dual-screen or tri-screen wallpaper for Windows

If you happen to run dual monitors, the only thing that sucks is that when you set a wallpaper in Windows XP (don’t know about Vista), the same wallpaper appears on both screens. It especially sucks if one monitor is one is a widescreen and one isn’t (which is my case), because the wallpaper will skew or not fill up the screen entirely on one of them.

Making dual-screen or tri-screen wallpaper is actually fairly easy if you know how to do basic graphics editing.

How to make dual-screen wallpaper with two non-widescreen monitors:

Let’s say you have two monitors, each with 1024×768 resolution. To make a dual-screen wallpaper, you can either put two different 1024×768 images into the same image, or make a double-wide image from a hi-res image.

I’ll explain.

If you have two 1024×768 resolution monitors running in dual-screen mode, Windows XP treats this as a 2048×768 resolution, i.e. the width is doubled while the height remains the same. So if you create an image that has 2048×768 dimensions, this will work and when properly set, the image will span across both monitors.

Using your graphics editor (such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop), create a blank 2048×768 image.

Find two 1024×768 images and open them up in your graphics editor.

Copy and paste the first image on the left, then the second one on the right.

Save the file to C:\WINDOWS\Web\Wallpaper (JPG file extension is okay).

Go to your Display Properties, select the image you just saved for your wallpaper, and set it to “Tile”.

Ta-da – dual-screen wallpaper.

Other examples:

If you have two 1280×1024 monitors, once again double the width of the image you make. Make a 2560×1024 image. If you have two 1600×1200 monitors, make a 3200×1200 image, etc. etc.

The same process is done for three monitors, except you triple the width. If you have three 1280×1024 monitors, the image you make should be 3840×1024.

How to make dual-screen wallpaper with two monitors – one wide and one non-wide:

My primary monitor happens to be 1680×1050 and my secondary is 1280×1024. The way to make wallpaper for this is slightly different.

Your width is both resolution widths added together. In this case it was 2960 pixels wide.

Your height is the largest monitor’s pixel height. Since the 1050 is greater than 1024, the image height is 1050.

So what I needed to do was make a 2960×1050 image.

If I want a single image that spans across both monitors it’s fairly straightforward. What counts is the size.

If I want different wallpaper on each monitor – the first image is a 1680×1050 placed on the left. The 1280×1024 image is placed on the right and pushed to the top. This leaves a small blank area on the right side when editing – but that’s okay, because when placed as a wallpaper the line disappears because it fits the secondary monitor’s screen resolution.

Yes, I know this sounds confusing at first – but once you do it a few times it’s easy to make dual and tri-screen wallpapers.