Why is it so difficult to save a picture from the web and make it a background?

[Android Central Question]

(Phone is S8+)
This should be a very easy task. There should be a "save as wallpaper" option somewhere.. but I have tried everything I can think of.
I go to the internet, find an image I want to save as a background (wallpaper), then I long press or some other method to download the image.
Once it is downloaded however, it doesn't show up anywhere. It is not in downloads in my gallery or anywhere else that I can see.
I use to have a phone where all I had to do was open a picture in the default gallery program and long press it and had an option to "set as background".
If I pull down the notification where it says the file has been downloaded and click that, it brings up the picture in gallery. However, there are zero options. It is just the image and no amount of long presses or anything else will do anything. All you can do is see the image and close gallery. You can't see any other images or do anything else but look at that one photo.

Can someone please give me a step by step guide to accomplish this task?

 

[Rukbat]

This should be a very easy task. There should be a "save as wallpaper" option somewhere.

Somewhere, yes, but not in a web browser. Take a screenshot. If it has too much on it, edit it.

Once it is downloaded however, it doesn't show up anywhere. It is not in downloads in my gallery or anywhere else that I can see.

Did you restart the phone? Downloading doesn't trigger Media Scan, so you can't use the downloaded picture until you restart and rebuild the Media Scan database.

I use to have a phone where all I had to do was open a picture in the default gallery program and long press it and had an option to "set as background".

If Gallery showed it. It won;t until you restart the phone to rebuild the Media Scan database.

If I pull down the notification where it says the file has been downloaded and click that, it brings up the picture in gallery. However, there are zero options. It is just the image and no amount of long presses or anything else will do anything. All you can do is see the image and close gallery. You can't see any other images or do anything else but look at that one photo.

Because Gallery is being called with the name of the picture file - but it's not in the database Restart the phone.

 

[chanchan05]

It has something to do with how Google changed the search app. It no longer actually downloads the image, it just saves it to cache. Before it actually downloaded and saved the image to the phone. If you want to download and save the image, you need to open it up in a browser. So you either search from the browser and not the search app, or in the search app first open the image in it's own browsers tab, then long press it to get the download image app (don't use save). Then you can access the image from the notification bar and get all proper gallery options like setting as wallpaper.

 

[Mooncatt]

Somewhere, yes, but not in a web browser. Take a screenshot. If it has too much on it, edit it.

Did you restart the phone? Downloading doesn't trigger Media Scan, so you can't use the downloaded picture until you restart and rebuild the Media Scan database.

If Gallery showed it. It won;t until you restart the phone to rebuild the Media Scan database.

Because Gallery is being called with the name of the picture file - but it's not in the database Restart the phone.

Is all this business about restarting the phone unique to newer Samsungs? In any phone I've had (admittedly none Samsung), the galley app would show downloaded images right away with no need to restart the phone. I just asked my wife, who has an S7 Edge, and her downloaded photos show up immediately too. So unless this is something new, I would think not having it show up immediately in the galley is a bug.