First of all, English is not my main language, nor am I fluent in it. I hope all the following instructions made some sense for you.
Albedo Wallpaper Cropper (AWC) is an utility to load, crop, and save images. It's not an image editor like Photoshop or GIMP. Instead it's a tool to help collect and standardize custom backgrounds for Albedo ES Theme and Elementerial ES Theme.
You can load an image, position it on canvas, link it to a videogame console. Many images are accepted, but one at time. After saving an image, you can download one or all as zip.
To start collecting your images, open Albedo Wallpaper Cropper.
AWC is a simple app, but can be a bit confuse. This tutorial will cover the basic usage: load image, position, change resolution, link to a videogame console, download as zip, extract zip to the theme folder.
On the left side of the screen there are 3 buttons and one text field. To load an image, tap the blue button labeled Load Image. Your browser will open a window to select an image. JPG, PNG and WEBP are accepted.
Tip: You can paste an image from clipboard by tapping Ctrl+V (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+V (Mac). It's helpful if you want to load an image from a website. Still, some images are very large to load from clipboard, you can download and load normally as described above.
After load, the image will be presented on the canvas in the middle of the screen.
Screenshot from Pokémon Unbound by Skeli
By default, the canvas will always load as 1920x1280, this size is 4 times the RG351P/M resolution (480x320).
On the right side of the screen you can see a panel with text fields to manually change the canvas resolution and a preset menu sorted by aspect ratio. You can hover the ? icon or buttons to see a tooltip.
We'll continue our tutorial with the current settings.
As the image I loaded is an screenshot, I'll uncheck 'Smooth rendering' so the pixels will look sharp.
Smooth rendering is good if you are trying to use a photo or illustration.
Of course you noted that the canvas has dimmed parts. It's a visual clue to help you position your image. The area inside the square on center will appear on the theme carousel, and the dimmed parts on the sides will appear on Game List.
You can move your image for the better framing. By default the canvas anchor your image on the edges and will move only horizontally or vertically, but not both. If your image has portrait sizes (height greater than width) and your canvas has landscape sizes (width greater than height), some parts of your image ill be off canvas. Anchoring the image to move in just one direction help move it without the risk of getting an unwanted black border on your resulting image.
On the left side, click on the text field Type to add a system. I'll search for 'Game Boy Advance (Hacks)', as the screenshot I loaded is from a Pokémon hack rom.
The list of systems on AWC is the same used by AmberELEC, found on es_systems.cfg, plus automatic collections. The search accepts the full console name (e.g. Game Boy Advance), the theme name (e.g. gba) and manufacturer name.
Start typing and click on desired option, I'll select gbah, then click on the yellow button labeled 'Add System'.
If you're using Albedo ES Theme on a different system, you can enter a custom name if the entries present on list is not compatible. Batocera accept
gbc2playersas theme and rom directory for example.
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|---|---|
| Search for desired system | Image added to list |
The image will be added to a list o images sorted by the newest (with orange border) to the oldest added image. AWC will always save a normal and a blurred version of your image as you can see on the above screenshot. When you hover the image, your mouse pointer will change to a magnifying glass. You can zoom the added image to see the final result.
You can repeat the steps above if you want to add more images.
I used the same image on new entries to show you the pagination and search features. Pagination is pretty simple. You can hover the buttons for more information. Search added items work the same way as search to add a system. You can use full name, theme name or manufacturer.
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|---|---|
| Pagination | Search |
AWC can export one or all items. (Select specific items to export is not yet implemented, maybe never).
To export a single item, click on the 3 dots button of the item card, them click Export ***. In this tutorial example: Export gbah.
A zip file will be downloaded containing the normal and blurred versions inside a subfolder called blurred.
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|---|---|
| Downloading single item as Zip | Images and blurred variant |
To export all items, click on Menu button, with the 3 bars. Then, click on Download as ZIP.
A zip file will be downloaded containing all the items and its blurred versions.
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|---|---|
| Download all items as Zip | Images and blurred variants |
Extract the files anywhere and move them to a folder called customBackground located on the root of the theme directory. Note that Elementerial ES Theme does not need blur variants, and Albedo ES Theme you can opt to use non blurred background, thus blur directory os not mandatory in both cases.
On the video below I show the process. I access my RG351M through SMB, entering its local IP and navigating to the AmberELEC theme folder:
[device_location]/config/emulationstation/themes/
Inside es-theme-albedo you can see some files and folders: theme.xml, assets, etc. The files must be placed inside customBackground.
After moving the images to the right place, you need to enable custom backgrounds. On your device press Start to open system menu > UI Settings > Theme Set change to es-theme-albedo > Theme Configuration > Theme Background change to Custom. Exit to apply changes.
The following pictures shows the changes from Default to Custom backgrounds, and the differences between choosing normal or blurred on Game List Background option
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|---|---|
Default background for gbah |
Custom background for gbah |
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|---|---|
| Full image | blurred version | Full image | not blurred |
As you can see, on carousel interface, just the center of the image is shown. As mentioned on step 2, the dimmed area of the canvas is supposed to appear only on game list.
You can replace any added image with the image currently on canvas without deleting it first.
AWC saves your images locally on browser database and will never collect any data. AWC depend on Internet connection just for the first load an can work offline.
You can export your background collection as a file if you want to save on cloud and can import the file if needed. Exporting will save a JSON file with the extension .awc.json. The .awc extension prefix serves as a filter so the browser will not show any other .json files when loading projects.
