How to Make Your Own Dual-Screen Wallpaper for the iPhone Duo

The wallpapers on this site are made the same way you can make your own: one piece of artwork, exported twice for two differently shaped screens. If you have a photo, a render or a drawing you would like to use on your iPhone Duo, this is the workflow. It does not need expensive software — any editor that can crop and export at a set size will do.

What you are building

The goal is not one file but two:

• A portrait Cover file for the outer screen, at 1398 × 2034 pixels.
• A landscape Inner file for the open display, at 2670 × 1878 pixels.

They should look like the same artwork. If you only need one screen, make the file for that screen and skip the rest.

Step 1: Start from the best possible source

Everything downstream inherits the quality of what you start with.

• Resolution. The inner display alone is 2670 pixels wide, so a source that is only 1000 pixels wide will have to be stretched and will look soft. Start as large as you reasonably can.
• Orientation. A landscape photo works naturally for the inner display; a portrait photo suits the cover screen. If your source is very wide or very tall, you can still use it for both crops, but you will throw away a lot of the frame on one of them.
• Detail. Avoid images with heavy noise or artifacts in the shadows. On a dark wallpaper, a noisy image looks twice as bad because there is nothing bright to hide it behind.

Step 2: Compose for the cover screen

Work on the portrait crop first, because it is the more demanding of the two.

1. Crop to roughly 1398 × 2034, or to the same aspect ratio and resize later.
2. Place the subject in the lower two-thirds. The top of a tall screen is where the clock goes.
3. Keep the top quarter calm. A soft sky, a flat gradient or a dark wash. Busy detail up there will fight the clock and, on the cover screen, the camera cutout.
4. Leave a margin at the edges. Do not let important detail touch the border, because a little of the frame can be trimmed.

Think of this crop as a poster: one clear subject, generous space, nothing crowding the top.

Step 3: Compose for the inner display

Now the landscape crop. This is a wide panel, so the rules are a little different.

1. Crop to about 2670 × 1878.
2. Keep the subject near the centre. The far left and right of a wide panel are peripheral; it is easy to never look at them.
3. Carry the same colour story across. The two files should share a horizon height, a light direction and a palette, so unfolding the phone feels continuous.
4. Watch the corners. Rounded panel corners can clip a little of each corner, so keep anything precious away from the extreme edges.

If you are working from a single photo, the honest truth is that the two crops will tell slightly different stories, because they have different proportions. That is fine — the goal is that they feel like one wallpaper, not that they are pixel-identical.

Step 4: Adjust tone and contrast for a screen

A photo that looks right in a photo editor can look flat as a wallpaper, because the interface sits on top of it.

• Lower the contrast of the top area on the cover file so white text stays readable.
• For a dark wallpaper, deepen the blacks toward true black. On an OLED panel, when those pixels switch off you get both a cleaner look and a small power saving. A large, calm dark field beats a busy murky one.
• For a light wallpaper, keep the highlights soft rather than blown out. A pure white background makes the status bar disappear.
• Do not sharpen aggressively. On a phone-sized screen, extra sharpening mostly adds visible halos around edges.

Step 5: Export

Export each crop at the exact size for its screen:

• Cover: 1398 × 2034 px, portrait.
• Inner: 2670 × 1878 px, landscape.

Choose the format based on the content. A photograph is usually fine as a high-quality JPG; flat graphics, sharp edges or large areas of a single colour are better as PNG, because JPG creates visible artifacts around hard edges and gradients. Save at the highest quality setting you can without making the file enormous.

Name the files so you can tell them apart later — my-wallpaper-cover.jpg and my-wallpaper-inner.jpg is enough.

Step 6: Set both screens

Transfer the files to your phone and set them through the wallpaper picker:

1. Open the cover file and set it on the outer screen, checking the crop against the clock.
2. Open the inner file and set it on the open display.
3. Look at the lock screen once. If the subject is partly under the clock, re-crop and export again — it is a two-minute fix at this stage.

The how-to-set guide walks through the screens if you want the tap-by-tap steps, and the cover vs inner guide explains the composition rules in more depth.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Using one file for both screens. The most common cause of a wallpaper that looks wrong on a folding phone.
• Exporting too small. A wallpaper is viewed full screen; softness is obvious.
• Ignoring the top of the cover screen. The clock is not going away.
• Forgetting the dark-pixel trick. If you are going dark, go properly dark at the top of the cover file so the camera cutout disappears into the image.

If you would rather not build it

There is nothing wrong with downloading a finished pair. Every set in the wallpaper catalog is already composed, cropped and exported for both screens, in original quality with no watermark. Preview the light or dark set, download the files you want, and you are done.