iOS 27 wallpaper: what's new, exact sizes, and your own

Where iOS 27 stands right now

Apple announced iOS 27 at WWDC in June 2026 and has spent the summer shipping developer betas, with general availability slated for the fall, per Apple — recent major iOS releases have arrived in September, alongside new iPhones. As of this page's check date the release has not happened, which is why everything here is phrased as what is known, not what is shipping on your phone today.

The update comes with new default wallpapers, including versions that respond to device motion. You will not find them here: Apple's artwork is Apple's, and this site hosts, traces, and recreates none of it. What this site does instead is the thing no default set does — render an original wallpaper at your exact panel's pixels, from a seed you can see, keep, and share.

Compatibility, as reported from Apple's list: iOS 27 runs on the iPhone 11 and later, including the iPhone SE from the 2nd generation on. That range matters for wallpapers mainly because the headline generative features carry a much narrower hardware gate — covered below.

Wallpaper behavior: what is publicly known so far

Extend Your Wallpaper. When a photo is cropped too tightly or doesn't match the phone's aspect ratio, Apple Intelligence generates matching detail around the edges so the image fills the Lock Screen. It is a generative fix for a sizing problem you can also simply not have: an image at your panel's exact native pixels needs no extending, which is what the size chart and the maker exist for.

Lock Screen wallpapers from Image Playground. Apple's image generator gains the ability to produce Lock Screen backgrounds from a text description. The maker on this site is the opposite instrument, deliberately: no AI, no prompt, no surprise — an integer seed and a palette that render the same wallpaper every time, on any phone, with nothing sent anywhere.

A compact clock layout. A new Lock Screen option moves the time to a smaller format in the top corner alongside the date, leaving more of the wallpaper visible. More visible wallpaper means composition earns more: a render that holds up as a whole image, not just as a backdrop for a large centered clock.

Adjustable Liquid Glass. A system-wide slider tunes Liquid Glass elements — the clock, buttons, widgets — from clear toward opaque. At the clear end, what sits behind that glass is your wallpaper, so the brightness of the region behind the clock still decides legibility at every setting. That is a measurable property, and the depth-effect checker measures it.

And a caution from the beta cycle itself. One developer beta was reported to add a Notification Center animation that lifts the wallpaper's depth-effect subject out as a floating cutout; coverage of the next beta reports it gone again. That churn is the normal texture of a beta summer — and the reason this page separates what Apple has announced from what any given build happens to show this week.

Exact wallpaper sizes for the current iPhones

Wallpaper size is a property of the panel, not the software: iOS 27 changes no resolutions, so the right export size for your phone is the same native pixels it shipped with. The current lineup, each row linking the maker pre-set to that model:

Sizes for the iPhone 14 through 16 families — all of which run iOS 27 — are on the full iPhone wallpaper size chart, each with its own preset. Older supported models, back to the iPhone 11 and SE, aren't charted: look up the native resolution in the model's tech specs and use the maker's custom size (240–4096 px per side).

Anything Apple announces this fall is absent for the boring reason that unpublished specifications can't be cross-checked. This page lists what is verifiable today, and says so, dated.

Make your own: five September-mood seeds

These five are original renders from this site's mesh-gradient engine, curated for the season the release lands in: dark grounds that keep a light clock legible, warm and violet ranges that sit well in low light. The connection to iOS 27 is mood, not imitation — nothing here recreates anyone's artwork, and nothing here is an image file at all. Each card is a visible seed rendered live in your browser; open one in the maker to change its seed, palette, or device, or to export it at any listed phone's native pixels.

Depth effect, set up honestly

The lock-screen depth effect — the clock layering behind your photo's subject — works the same way in the iOS 27 betas as it does today: the phone's own subject segmentation decides, and no website can run that decision for you. What a page like this can do is help you fix the three failures that are actually fixable: an image smaller than your panel's native pixels, a subject sitting outside the zone where the layering happens, and a clock area too busy or too mid-toned to read.

Before you set a photo, run it through the depth-effect checker: it gives an exact resolution verdict for your model, overlays neutral labeled bands showing where the status bar, clock, and widgets sit at that model's proportions, and measures the contrast of the image region behind the clock — all in your browser, with the photo never leaving your device. One iOS 27 caveat: the reported compact clock option moves the time out of its classic centered band, and the checker's overlay describes the standard layout, so treat its bands as guidance for that layout.