Users with widescreen(16:9) monitors have different aspect ratio requirements for wallpaper, although images designed for standard(4:3) monitors can often be scaled or cropped to the correct shape without loss of quality.

Wallpapers are sometimes available in double-width versions (e.g. 2560 x 1024) for displaying on multi-monitor computers, where the image appears to fill two monitors. Digital Blasphemy is one of the main sources for multi-monitor wallpapers.

Smaller images can be tiled (repeated) to fill large areas, and depending on how skilfully the wallpaper was created, the effect can look reasonably good. However, if the join is too obvious, or the image repeats too many times, it will look very repetitive.

With the increase in color screen mobile phones, wallpapers are starting to appear scaled to their lower resolution. These are often sold at a high profit to telephone users, although some phones have software which allows images to be uploaded from a computer. Mobile telephones with cameras can often use images from the camera, or from a received image, as the wallpaper.

Most display systems are capable of specifying a single-colour to use as the background in place of a wallpaper, and some (such as KDE) allow colour-gradients to be specified. MS Windows systems allow using editable repeating two-color 8x8 tiles for background.

From version 3.4 KDE supports vector wallpaper in SVG format. This has the advantage that a single file may be used for screens of any size without loss of quality.

Styles
Wallpaper styles are as varied as people themselves, using photographs, drawings, 3D renders or abstract pattern with complex gradients. It can be useful to have plain areas so that icons can be clearly seen atop the wallpaper.

Typical categories can include cars, models and celebrities, holiday photos, abstract art, movies, pets and scenery.

In business use, corporate logos or plain backgrounds are often specified by the IT department.

When using rack mounted computers through a keyboard switch, it can often be useful to create a wallpaper with the computer's name on it, to easily identify which computer you're connected to.

Timed wallpapers
Some operating environments (e.g. KDE) allow a number of different wallpapers to be used, and "rotated" to display a different wallpaper at different times, to display a random image from a directory. If the facility is not available in the OS' wallpaper settings, it may be possible to get an external program which can change the wallpaper at certain times.

Active wallpapers
Programs such as xplanet (http://xplanet.sourceforge.net) use internet connections and graphics calculations to change the wallpaper with real data, such as a shadowed view of the earth, the latest cloud or weather map, or various events. Some media players can redirect video playback to desktop, allowing using any video as a wallpaper.