No longer do you have to download pictures from other websites for your iPhone backgrounds, nor do you have to rely on pictures you’ve taken with your iPhone. If you’ve made an image you want to move to your iPhone, you can!

Please pardon my enthusiasm–after a few months of owning my iPhone, I finally figured out how to load self-made pictures onto my iPhone, and I’m very happy about it, as you can tell. 😀 If you’re like me and enjoy playing around in image creation programs, your iPhone provides you yet another outlet for your creative expression; it just takes a little time!

Some Visual Examples!

Here are a few (shrunken) examples of iPhone background images I either made myself or edited:

The first three images are edited from images I downloaded from the Internet; credits are at the bottom of this article. The last two are simpler abstract images I made myself.

Here are some tips and tricks I came up with while I was making, editing, and transferring these images:

Image Styles

Technical Stuff

For home screens, it’s generally best to have more abstract/simpler backgrounds, since most of your picture will be covered up by app icons. For lock screens, anything goes–recognizable images or photos work great, since you’ll be able to see more of the picture. Want to be able to read the app icons’ text? Then make sure your background image is darker so the white text stands out.

Images can be in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format. Because you can move and scale the image once you load it onto your iPhone, the picture’s width and length doesn’t much matter–but pictures which are taller than they are wide usually work the best. Keep your file sizes as small as possible without skimping on quality, so that your iPhone’s memory isn’t stuffed full of just background pictures. Photos saved as JPEGs usually have smaller file sizes; so do fairly simple abstract images saved as PNGs.

Putting These Works of Art on Your iPhone

WonderShare.com has an excellent, simple tutorial to help you through transferring your images to your iPhone. If you don’t want to sync all your photos/images to your iPhone, simply make a separate folder for your created/edited iPhone backgrounds, and just sync that folder to your iPhone.

Credits/Resources

There are lots of image resources on the Internet which can provide you with beautiful pictures to use as iPhone backgrounds (and lots more). Here are some of my favorites:

FreeFoto.com
FreeImages.co.uk
Vector4Free.com

Swans on a Colorful Lake Photo