wallpaper sizes - guide / help?

[fotonix]

If I want to share photos as wallpapers, what is "best practice" in terms of what sizes to include and how to package / present?

That was the dense version. Now for a looser style

Wallpapers should fit the screen so things like aspect ratio don't get messed up. There are several common screen aspect ratios like 3:4 and 16:9 at several resolutions. In making photos available as wallpapers, what sizes should one prepare? Is it best then to tar/gz them all together? Does one need to add a script to install them in a new folder under /usr/share/backgrounds? What is the correct, Linux way to do this?

[bimsebasse]

I haven't noticed a Linux specific way of doing this - usually wallpapers come in a folder with a set of 3-4-5-6-7 versions for some of the standard resolutions.

Here's a good example of how to package wallpapers: http://bo0xvn.deviantart.com/art/16-195628281 (you can get away with less resolutions, and .zip is probably a more practical compression format - you can of course also choose .tar.gz but there's no reason really to alienate non-Linux users with the compression format)

[fotonix]

Thank you for explaining that there is no specific packaging other than a generic archive, and the link. What I found interesting is that the sample wallpaper came in 9 different resolutions, but only 4 unique aspect ratios and only 1 corresponded to the common laptop screens of 1366x768 (which are too small to really work on). For distribution I would likely only include the three marked with *

2560x1600 => 1.6:1 *
1920x1200 => 1.6:1
1920x1080 => 1.778:1 *
1680x1050 => 1.6:1
1600x1200 => 1.333:1 *
1440x900 => 1.6:1
1280x1024 => 1.25:1
1280x800 => 1.6:1
1024x768 => 1.333:1