Friday, March 29, 2024

Watch faces auto shift in ‘Always On’ mode on the LG G Watch R, here’s how to compensate for it

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LG_G_Watch_R_Watch_Face_Shifted_Always_On_Mode_01

If you own the LG G Watch R, you might have noticed that your watch faces seem to shift ever so slightly when in the dimmed “Always On” mode. Then when the face fully lights up, it goes back to center, especially with apps like Facer. You’re not alone in that a lot of people have noticed it. It appears to be by design as a way to prevent screen burn in. The only problem is that some faces look horrible as you can see in the image above. You want to utilize the “Always On” display so you can enjoy your watch face, but seeing white around the sides just ruins the experience. There is no way to turn this feature off (you wouldn’t want to), but there is something that you can do to compensate for it.

Even though the G Watch R is round, all the custom faces are still part of a square-shaped image file. Any custom face that you want to use on this device needs to have a black background, Now when the watch face shifts slightly, it won’t be as noticeable. The only exception would be if the watch face is primarily white and doesn’t have a border around it.

The problem lies in that if you find a watch face on facerepo (or some other sharing site) that you really like, it’s a little bit of a pain to fix. You need to extract the image from the .zip or .face file and do some Photo Shop magic by replacing the white part around the circle with black. The .zip files should be able to be opened via any archive software, but I was only able to open the .face files with 7-Zip. You can also change the .face extension files to .zip and it will then open with any archive software.

All the images for the watch face will be in the Images folder. You only need to concern yourself with the main face, which is usually the largest file in terms of bytes. Unfortunately it won’t have an extension, so some photo editing programs might not recognize it. You can certainly add .png (or jpg) to the file name and give it a shot, but I found that Paint Shop wasn’t able to open them. However, I found that GIMP (free open source) was able to with the changed extension or even without changing the extension. I don’t have Photo Shop or any other software so I can’t speak for them. Your mileage will vary.

Once you have a black background, you can save it as a .png file and replace the image in the Facer app (or similar app), and you should be good to go. Here’s what the image files look like before (left) and after (right)….

Colorful_Watch_Face_White_BackgroundColorful_Watch_Face_Black_Background

And here’s what the new black background version looks like on the G Watch R in the “Always On” dimmed mode with the same upward shift…..

LG_G_Watch_R_Watch_Face_Always_On_Mode_01

It is a little bit of a pain to do, but if you really like a face, it’s not too much work. Alternatively, you can always ask the creator of the watch face to do it for you.

Note: A transparent background may also work, but there can’t be any odd colors at the edges of the watch face graphic. The example watch face in this post had some white spots at the top edge so it didn’t work. It’s actually much easier to replace the background with black than crop out a selection and copy it to a transparent background, in my opinion.

I hope this guide helped you, and if you notice any other tricks, please let me know in the comments and I will be sure to add it to the post.

 

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