[Reminder]Wallpaper referencing will kill your battery!

[greevedogg]

This is something I had forgot about, and I bet a lot of you out there are experiencing this as well...

This might be a refresher course for some of you. Or maybe this might be that wake-up call you need!

When you decide to customize the look of your lock screen and wallpaper, make sure the picture that you are referencing is in the proper folder!!!

The first couple of days with my s3, battery life was awesome!


Then I decided to give that new Atom Launcher a try!
So I customized it the way I liked it and it looked great!
But then battery life started to suffer:


How was I getting almost two days worth of life out of my phone before, and now I've dropped almost half of my battery in 4 hours!!!! What the heck?!?!

So at first, I'm thinking, "man, Atom launcher is killing my battery! I've got to go back to stock so I can at least get through the day!"

...Then it hits me...
I remembered all the way back to my LG Chocolate days...
At one point I changed the picture on the Chocolate to a pic that I had saved on my SD card. It looked nice, but my battery life started to plummet!
I finally figured out that my phone was CONSTANTLY REFERENCING the picture off of my SD card, even when the screen was off!
All I had to do was transfer the file over to the internal storage and my battery problems were solved! WHEW!!!

So, in the past day, I did the same thing!
I was using a wallpaper background that my s3 was CONSTANTLY REFERENCING, thus sucking the juice out of my battery like a DYSON!!!

So just as a friendly reminder...

Make sure that any picture you want to use is located in the correct internal storage folder! Your phone will thank you!

[Mr_Trebus]

Where do live wallpapers live?

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

[RayRay]

A couple of questions about your philosophy?

1. When I changed the wallpaper for the lock screen, It had me crop it from a picture that I had on the sdcard. When the crop is saved for the wallpaper, doesn't it save it on the internal storage anyway?

2. This question is asked because of the different setup than the Droid X. Is the internal storage you are specifying the same as the 16g or 32g (depending on which phone you buy) storage? Or are you talking about the internal storage that stores the operating system files? Unlike the DX, you have the "extSdCard" folder which is the card that you install into the slot. Then you have the "sdcard" folder which is the built in storage. Then you have the "hidden" internal storage that most cannot mess with unless you are rooted.

[spodoc]

It's an interesting thing to consider. Where do you suggest wluld be a good place to put them? Thing is though i can use aphoto from a sd card and then remove the card and the background is still there so im not convinced that android continues to reference the original photo

[Rosie684]

It's an interesting thing to consider. Where do you suggest wluld be a good place to put them? Thing is though i can use aphoto from a sd card and then remove the card and the background is still there so im not convinced that android continues to reference the original photo

Yea I have a wallpaper I set and actually deleted the photo from my sdcard and it still loads up as my background

Sent from my SCH-I535 aka the iPhone 5 killer :-)

[shooter03]

Where's the op gone? I would definitely like to know more about this as I sure do love to change my wallpapers.


Tap'n Like A Boss on my S3

[CR6]

Interesting observation for sure. I can't imagine it would be constantly referencing your Ext SD card simply for the wallpaper. One would think that once you set your wallpaper, it's then stored internally somewhere. The battery life flucuation could have just been a coincedence on the OP's part, there are so many other things that effect the battery, it's hard to say. I wonder if GSam battery monitor would be able to truly pinpoint this?
All I know is I've never gotten 2 days of battery life out of my phone, so it's really not an issue for me. I'm on my phone way too much.

[greevedogg]

Where's the op gone? I would definitely like to know more about this as I sure do love to change my wallpapers.

I'm still here! Like I said, this happened to me a looong time ago with my lg chocolate, and then I started experiencing crazy battery drain with WallBase, so I kinda correlated the two, but it could certainly be any number of things. I was having really high battery drain issues coming from gallery when I checked Gsam and BBS....So, I changed locations & how I was setting wp and that seemed to kill the draining issues, so something fishy was going on, just not exactly sure what it was. I just know that I don't have any issues any more.

I sometimes still use wallbase or zedge to find cool wallpapers, I just store the pics internally, and use gallery or quickpic to set it.

hope that helps!

[Miller6386]

If you change the wallpaper from within the display settings or long pressing on the home screen it does store the "Temporary Picture" within the system itself.... I know some of the older systems (Froyo and possibly GB) did actually read the photo from original location... ICS pulls the photo and copies it into the system so that the original can be deleted without losing the ability to keep it as your wallpaper.... However once you change your wallpaper the new one will take its place within the System folder and it will be gone if you don't have it backed up somewhere....

[Phoebe]

I have Atom Launcher. And since I used the launcher, I noticed a considerable battery drain. But when I check my battery status via Gsam, this is what it shows:

You think OP's theory might be the reason behind my battery drain or maybe some other factor/s?

Edit: All my wallpapers are saved in my ExtSDCard, but the one I'm using now is the theme wallpaper.