A 2-monitor setup among photographers is becoming more and more common, especially with the dropping price of supporting hardware and the influx of LCD monitors. I have a 2 monitor setup at work and at home and they are an important part of my setup and workflow.

Being a photographer, I often like to use my own work as wallpaper. One thing I’ve had problems with, though, is when I set a wallpaper with dual monitors it repeats the same wallpaper on both screens. It would be nice if I could set separate wallpaper for each or even better, span a long pano-type image across both monitors.

I’d been struggling with this problem for a while – at least until I found a great, free tool, Display Fusion. The one downside is that it is for PC users only (it works on XP and Vista) – if you are on a Mac, feel free to post other solutions in the comments section of the post.

Display Fusion, which can be downloaded here, solves wallpaper problems with dual monitors and more. After installing, you can pull up the properties of Display Fusion to configure its two primary purposes – wallpaper display and shortcut keys.

Before I decided to keep and recommend the program, though, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a computer resource hog. I have enough background processes as it is and needed this to be small. After running, I pulled up the Task Manager and reviewed its usage under various circumstances. On Windows Vista, it idles at around 800 KB of memory and spikes up to around 1.5 or 2 MB of memory. That’s lower than most other processes, even light ones, so running Display Fusion won’t tax your system!

Based on its robust, yet simple features, small impact on system resources and great price, I highly recommend Display Fusion.

Wallpaper Display

The tool provides several options for displaying different images on each monitor or to span one image across monitors. It adds a few nice features like stretch/ centering, shifting the background up/down and left/right to get it right where you want it and to access photos directly from Flickr.  The Flickr feature lets you search Flickr groups/people/text fields and easily display rotating images from the search results.

The interface is very straightforward – I tried several images with it and it worked flawlessly. Keep in mind that if you want to span a picture across both monitors you’ll need to find/adjust one to be more panoramic than usual. It will adjust it for you if needed, but if it isn’t meant to be very wide, it could end up distorting it.

Shortcut Keys

Display Fusion is worth downloading/installing based on its wallpaper features alone, so its added support for Shortcut Keys is a real treat.

The settings display about a dozen common actions you would want to perform with program windows between the two monitors, such as moving a window from one to the other, spanning a window across both, etc. You can assign a keyboard shortcut to the various actions. They worked very smoothly with very little, if any lag, between using the shortcut and seeing the windows move as requested. I don’t move things around a lot but this is definately a timesaver.