Lock Screen or Desktop: Two Screens, Two Jobs
One is read in two seconds; the other stays behind everything you do.
The lock screen and the desktop are usually filled with the same file, as if they were the same surface. They are not. One is looked at for about two seconds, with a clock lying across it. The other waits behind every window you open and is still there at the end of the day.
A lock screen can carry a loud picture: deep colour, a bright horizon, a face. You never really read it, so it survives the noise. What it cannot carry is a crowded upper third, because that is where the time and the notifications land, and most systems blur or darken that band anyway. Leave air where the numbers go and the photograph keeps its shape under the overlay.
The desktop asks for the opposite. Icons sit in the corners, windows cover the middle, and what remains visible is a frame with a hole in it. Something quieter, slightly underexposed, with its detail kept away from the edges, holds up better than the picture you would have chosen to hang on a wall. One frame can serve both, cropped twice: a version with room at the top, and a version that agrees to stay behind.
