Prevent background pictures from getting cropped
Having run xplanet depicting moonphases on my Linux desktops for more than 15 years I was pleased to find xplanet and xplanet-background on OpenRepos. I promptly got and installed them. xplanet works and xplanet-background doesn't with SFOS 2.2.18. Which is fine -- moon doesn't change all that much, so if I must I can generate a new image each day and replace the one on the desktop. It's a pain, but there are worse things.
Problem is, xplanet generates a nice, round image that shows up perfectly in the Gallery, but if it is then made into an Ambience the thing has its sides lopped off. I cannot imagine that anyone would have deliberately done this, inasmuch as it makes no sense to just up and crop pictures for no reason. Which means I must have inadvertently set something incorrectly. Try as I might, I cannot find any such setting.
If there is no such setting, is there a utility somewhere that I can install that will let me have background images that look the way I want? Alternately, does anyone have the secret to getting xplanet-background to work on >2.22 versions of SFOS?
And while I'm here, if I want to uninstall the multitude of background images that I do not and never will use, where would they be located so that I might put them out of my misery?
Thanks!
related question
rfa ( 2018-10-18 09:23:51 +0200 )editDuplicate of sorts:
See the answer from @stateoftheart with regard to cropping images to fit correctly/nicely.
https://together.jolla.com/question/173798/ambiance-creation-without-cropping-background-image/
The image size for ambience is 2048 x 2048, the image you show is a quarter of that size @ 512 x 512, I'm not surprised it doesn't fit on the screen correctly. But ambience does crop in odd places anyway, always has done, especially as the original image size was 540 x 1600 (or very similar) but then Jolla launched the tablet and the ambience image size changed 2048x2048. There are posts concerning the cropping and placement of ambience images, you'll have to use the search facility to find it.
If by 'background images' you mean ambiences, then they are found in /usr/share/ambience/*, you could safely remove them by going to Settings/Ambience and long press on the ones you don't want and select 'Delete ambience'.
Spam Hunter ( 2018-10-18 10:48:53 +0200 )editThanks very much for the link -- I'd read the earlier questions somewhat related to the issue, though none of those provided much of an answer, either, and it seems that early in the 2.x series the handling of Ambience images got changed in some unspecified way. What I'm trying to figure out is why the images are arbitrarily cropped and what I can do to defeat it. A 2048x2048 image certainly will not fit on a 1920x1080 screen. Someone inexplicably actually wrote code designed to confound those who would supply their own images. Why would anyone do this but leave no over-ride? Apparently what happens here is that the OS subsystem takes a square image, blows it up to 2048x2048, then crops it. (If I supply a 2048x2048 image, it does the same thing in the final outcome, though it doesn't enlarge it first.) Surely there's some way to tell SFOS to leave the image the hell alone. Then if people want a cropped image, they can crop it themselves. The fact that someone actually went out of their way to code this is simply mindboggling. Thanks for the tip on Ambience deletion, which I've now done.
depscribe ( 2018-10-18 18:12:53 +0200 )editI gave up with ambience years ago, the entire thing is basically dead in the water as far as I'm concerned. I use the same ambience all the time, which is Ambience AllBlack, simple and makes the majority of text globally readable. Personally, I'd like to see the ambience module completely removed, it is about as useful as tits on a bull and is also closed source, making even harder to anything realistic with it.
Spam Hunter ( 2018-10-18 18:25:04 +0200 )editAt this point, besides wanting the image I'd like to have and, now, trying to deal with the challenge of it, I'm trying to figure out why in the name of creation they would do this, apparently on purpose. It makes absolutely no sense, cannot make anyone happier and in fact can lead only to frustration and annoyance. And then to make it undefeatable -- it's insane! Is there at least a size or specification such that if one feeds it to the cropping engine one can get what one wants on the screen? Or must one put a few hundred pixels of black all around the image one wants so as to let the cropping hatchet do what it's hell bent on doing and still end up with the intended image?
depscribe ( 2018-10-18 18:43:02 +0200 )edit