Wallpaper Preview Mockup
The real test of a wallpaper isn't how it looks on its own — it's how it looks behind your clock and icons. Drop in an image and check both.
How to read it
Two things usually decide whether a wallpaper works. First, the clock: if the top third of the image is busy or pale, white lock-screen text disappears into it — switch the text colour to dark and see whether that rescues it, or pick a different crop. Second, the icon labels: on the home screen, tiny captions sit directly on the wallpaper, and a high-contrast, high-detail background makes them hard to read. The safe-zone guide marks the area most launchers keep clear of system gestures.
If a candidate fails here, it's not a bad image — it's a bad background. The guide to choosing a wallpaper covers the two-day test that settles most of these, and the colour-theory piece explains why negative space in the right place matters more than the subject.
🔒 Your image stays on your device — it's shown locally and never uploaded. The time and date here are fixed sample values for the mockup.
What this mockup cannot tell you
The phone drawn here is a generic tall handset, and a few things will differ on your own device in ways worth knowing before you trust the preview:
- Your launcher's grid is probably not this one. A 4×5 grid leaves considerably more wallpaper visible than a 5×6 one. If you run a dense grid, assume less of the image survives than the mockup suggests.
- Parallax crops the edges. Most launchers scale a wallpaper wider than the screen so it can pan between home-screen pages. That means the left and right margins you see here may be pushed off-screen on the page you actually look at.
- Always-on displays change the arithmetic. If your phone keeps a dimmed clock on the lock screen, the top of the image is effectively never clean.
- Notch and cutout shapes vary. A punch-hole camera sits in a different place from the pill drawn here, and on some phones it lands right where a face would be.
Treat the mockup as a fast rejection filter rather than a guarantee. It is very good at telling you that an image will not work; it is only suggestive about whether it will.
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