Your iPhone’s lock screen doesn’t have to be that boring interface that waits for you to swipe to enter a passcode. Your lock screen can do much more than that. In this article, you’ll learn how to customize iPhone lock screen so perfectly that friends will start taking lock screen customization classes from you.
If you can creatively customize your lock screen, you can bring some of the things you frequently need to the screen. Gone are the days when customizing a lock screen is synonymous with changing your wallpaper.
How To Customize iPhone Lock Screen
The first step to perfect customization of your iPhone’s lock screen is changing the wallpaper. iPhones have always had this feature, but it has improved over time with constant updates.
With iOS 14, changing your wallpaper has become a bit of an art. Not only has it become more intuitive, but it has also become more feature-rich.
In this section, you’ll learn how to customize your wallpaper with the most modern iOS features to make your iPhone lock screen stand out.
Setting the wallpaper
You can change the default wallpaper for your iPhone by going through the following steps.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone. It is represented by a gear-shaped icon.
- Find and select Wallpaper in the options, and tap “Choose a New Wallpaper.”
- You’ll need to select between Dynamic, Stills, or Live. These are the different kinds of wallpapers you can use on an iPhone, and we’ll explain more about them in a bit.
- Once you select the kind of wallpaper you want, you will be served a variety of wallpapers to choose from. Select your desired wallpaper and modify the picture to your liking using the available tools.
- Tap Set when everything looks good. You will need to confirm if you want it to be the lock screen wallpaper, your home screen wallpaper, or both.
- Since we’re customizing our iPhone’s lock screen, you should set this to Lock Screen only. Your new lock screen wallpaper should start working immediately.
Using a custom wallpaper
Sometimes, you go out for a photoshoot, and you get a perfect shot. You look at it again, and you feel like seeing it every time your phone lights up. Fortunately, your iPhone can do just that. Whether it’s a shot taken from your phone’s camera or a random picture downloaded off the internet, you can set custom wallpaper on your iPhone.
Before proceeding with the steps below, you should make sure that you have the image you wish to use as wallpaper as an image on your phone. You should also be able to access it through the Photos app for this to work. You can set custom wallpaper on your iPhone by following the steps below.
- Open the Photos app on your iPhone and navigate to the image you’ll like to use as your lock screen wallpaper.
- Select the image and tap the share icon to reveal several sharing options.
- Scroll through the sharing options and select “Use as Wallpaper.”
- You can modify the image using the available tools. Tap “Set” when you’re done and specify that you want it to be your lock screen image.
Managing notifications on iPhone lock screen
Choosing whether to have your notifications pop up on your iPhone’s lock screen is an important decision you have to make. It’s just the line between privacy and convenience.
Sometimes, notifications carry a little too much information that you don’t want all eyes to see. You can choose whether to have them pop up or not. By default, your message notifications show up on the lock screen.
If you want your message notifications to stop showing up on your lock screen, you’ll need to follow the steps below.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Select Notifications, and you’ll see a list of every app on your iPhone. Select the app for which you want to turn off lock screen notifications.
- On the resulting screen, tap on the Lock Screen, and a blue checkmark under the phone icon will disappear.
- While that will solve most of your problems, it might not be the most viable solution; some apps will allow you to customize how the notifications look.
- For example, you can turn off message previews on Messages. This might be all you need, and not turning off the notifications altogether.
Other iPhone lock screen customizations
If you’ve followed carefully from the start, you’ll notice that I mentioned that iPhone lock screen customization has gone past the wallpaper days. Now, you can set up your control center to open from your lock screen if that doesn’t sound like a privacy concern to you.
Your control center makes your media controls and some of the phone’s settings more accessible. Here is how to make your control center available from your iPhone’s lock screen.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone and select Face ID & Passcode. Depending on what iPhone model you’re using, this option might be Touch ID & Passcode.
- Enter your passcode. If it’s correct, you’ll see a plethora of options, all with toggles under the “REQUIRE ACCESS WHEN LOCKED” tab. When you toggle any of these options on, they start to show on your lock screen.
- If you want your control center to be accessible from your lock screen, tap the toggle after Control Center so that it’s showing green.
- Apart from your control center, you can also turn on some lock screen features to customize your iPhone lock screen.
- You can turn on Siri, which makes your assistant available from your lock screen. You can also turn on Today View which makes your widgets available.
However, you should know what you’re doing here, as some of the options might not be good for privacy. However, it is good to learn that you can customize your iPhone however you want.
Conclusion
Your iPhone’s lock screen might be the most restricted area on your iPhone, but it doesn’t have to look boring. If you’re tired of staring at the same thing every day, you should learn how to customize iPhone lock screen.
From basic customizations like wallpaper to advanced ones that will make your widgets available, you can effortlessly make your iPhone’s lock screen more productive.