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Wallhaven Aspect Ratio Research

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Attacktive edited this page Jun 8, 2026 · 1 revision

Wallhaven Aspect Ratio Research

The app auto-detects the device's screen aspect ratio and picks the closest ratio to use as a Wallhaven search filter. This page documents why certain ratios are included or excluded from the candidate list.

Methodology

Each ratio was queried against the unauthenticated Wallhaven search API and the total result count was recorded:

GET https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?ratios=<ratio>

The meta.total field from the response was used as the content count. Data collected June 2026 against the unauthenticated API (SFW-only pool). Authenticated requests with an API key may yield different counts for sketchy/NSFW content.

Results

Ratio Count Decision
16x9 200,378 ✅ included
16x10 64,859 ✅ included
4x3 15,542 ✅ included
3x4 4,349 ✅ included — portrait tablets (e.g. iPad in portrait)
21x9 5,352 ✅ included
9x16 5,419 ✅ included
1x1 4,957 ✅ included
10x16 1,370 ✅ included
32x9 1,168 ⏭ skipped — borderline, niche use case
9x18 688 ❌ excluded — too sparse
9x20 290 ❌ excluded — too sparse
9x19 262 ❌ excluded — too sparse
9x21 71 ❌ excluded — practically empty

Key Conclusions

  • Modern tall phones (1080×2400, 1080×2340, etc.) have no dedicated ratio with meaningful content on Wallhaven. Their actual aspect ratio (~9×20) yields fewer than 300 results. They correctly fall back to 9x16 via closest-match; the launcher handles the slight crop.

  • 3x4 was missing from the original ratio suggestions list but has solid coverage (4,349 results) — it is needed for tablets in portrait orientation.

  • The Wallhaven ratios parameter accepts arbitrary WxH strings — there is no canonical finite list of "valid" values. The candidate list in the app is curated based on content availability, not API constraints.

  • The API response carries ratio as a decimal (e.g. "ratio": "1.91"), suggesting Wallhaven does fuzzy matching internally rather than strict equality.

Final Candidate List

"9x16", "10x16", "3x4", "16x9", "16x10", "4x3", "21x9", "1x1"

Defined in AppSettings.kt as ASPECT_RATIO_CANDIDATES.

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