WinXP: Expand a wallpaper without affecting its aspect ratio

Question

Is it possible to set an image as a wallpaper in 'expanded' mode but without distording its aspect ratio?

For example:
Let's say your screen resolution is 1024x768, and as a wallpaper you set an image of size 800x500. If you set it in expanded mode, it will be expanded to cover the whole desktop which has a different aspect radio from that of the image.

Answer 1

Try using DisplayFusionFree is has a lot of great features regarding wallpaper and sizing it for your monitor. Here's a small screen shot of the program from the website, its hard to see but there's an option to resize the image to fit to the screen size.

Answer 2

Windows Vista upwards Windows 7 has this built in, and calls this way of positioning a desktop image Fill.

In your example 800x500 would be enlarged to ~1229x768, with the image centered horizontally on your screen, but with an excess of ~102 pixels missing from each side. So, the aspect ratio is unchanged but some image is lost.

Unfortunatly, this feature is not available in XP or Vista, so additional software may be required.

Alternatively, if you don't want extra software, you could manually resize your images so that they match your resolution's aspect ratio. Then using XP's stretch achieves the required results. In your example you could either horizontally trim 800x500 down to ~667x500 (losing some of the image) or add white/black space vertically to make it 800x600.