Publishing a wallpaper

Once you feel like your wallpaper is ready, you can publish it on the Workshop, though this is entirely optional. You can initiate the upload process by clicking on Workshop at the top of the editor and then selecting Prepare for publishing.

Please note

Publishing your wallpaper will not keep a backup of your project files. Make sure to manually back up your wallpaper project files in the wallpaper_engine\projects\myprojects directory if you wish to edit them in the future.

You will be presented with a publishing form where you can create a title and a description of your wallpaper. Additionally, you should select the appropriate genre for your wallpaper and you are required to select an age rating that fits the content of your wallpaper.

Wallpapers can be published with different levels of visibility: Publicly, Friends-only or Private. If you do not see the option to publish wallpapers publicly, your account may be restricted in some way.

Preview Images

Wallpaper Engine allows you to generate a static preview image with a few clicks or you can import a preview image that you have prepared with another tool. Make sure to always make the preview images suitable for all ages, even if your wallpaper targets an adult audience!

Animated Preview Images

You can also use animated GIFs as a preview image. GIFs can be up to 256x256px but Wallpaper Engine will only ever request 128x128px preview images from the servers. If you want the best quality in the app, you should stick to 128x128px. The maximum allowed file size is 1 MB but we recommend keeping the size below 500 KB.

Built-in GIF recorder

After clicking on the Take snapshot button, press G to switch to the GIF recording mode. You can press the F key to cycle through the different GIF recording quality modes where you can choose between resolution, frames per second and length of the GIF. You can see the current settings in the upper left corner of the preview creation mode. These limitations are mainly in place to ensure the GIF file meets the file size restrictions for preview images.

Uploading the wallpaper

Once you have filled out the wallpaper details, you can upload your wallpaper by clicking on the Publish button.

You can watch the following video to see the complete publishing process in action:

Publishing Updates

In the future, you can push an update to your existing wallpaper by going through this process again. Wallpaper Engine will remember each project automatically publish an update to all your users rather than publishing a brand new wallpaper. Keep in mind that updates are received with a little bit of a delay, so don't be concerned if your users don't see the update immediately.