How do I set the home screen background on my iPhone?

If you can figure out how to set the lock screen on your iPhone, you can figure out how to set the home screen too. Thing is, you might not know that the image that's displayed behind all the app icons on your phone is called the "home screen", which can be a bit awkward, but otherwise, there are a half-dozen taps involved, but it's pretty straightforward.

The biggest question you'll have to wrestle with is whether you want to use one of the canned images that Apple includes with the iPhone or whether you want to use a photo or image of your own. I'll demonstrate the former, then explain how to use your own photo to get the same basic result.

First step is to grab your iPhone and tap on the "Settings" app button.

You'll see this:

See the last option on the second set of settings? You want to tap on "Wallpaper" since that's the Apple name for the image that's on both the lock screen and the home screen.

I don't know why there's this intermediate step since there's only one option here, but it's been this way since the first release of iOS, as far as I can remember. Tap on this preview of what you currently have set for your lock screen (on the left) and your home screen (on the right)...

Here's where you can decide whether you want to use photos you've taken with the iPhone ("Camera Roll") or photos out of your photo library. Prefer to use the default images that Apple includes with the iPhone? Tap on "Wallpaper" instead, as I'll do.

The result is a set of fairly boring wallpapers that don't make for a good lock screen -- in my opinion! -- but work great as a background for the home screen with all of those cheery app icons:

I'm going to use the light brown pattern on the left of the fourth row. To use that, I simply tap on the image preview and it shows it quite a bit bigger:

Not what you want? Tap on "Cancel" and preview a different image. If you like it, however, tap on "Set" and you'll be presented with a few options:

If you'd like everything super consistent tap on "Set Both" and your lock screen and home screen will both be set to the image. I prefer them to be different, however, so in this case I'll tap on "Set Home Screen" and that's all I need to do.

Once I quit the Settings utility and am back at my home screen, you can see that the brown patterned background image is now being displayed, with all the icons "on top" of the pattern:

That's all there is to it. Try it a few times and it'll become second nature. I can change backgrounds in just a few seconds.

If you'd rather use a photo instead of an Apple wallpaper, just get to the individual photo on your iPhone and locate the small arrow coming out of the square on the lower left of the photo view:

Tap on that icon and you'll get some choices:

Again, tap on "Use as Wallpaper", then choose home screen and you're good to go!

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