The Photographer's Story Behind The Occult Wallpaper That Crashes Android Phones

JAKARTA - Some time ago, netizens were shocked by a wallpaper that could damage the user's cellphone. Some of them have even experienced a factory reset. So how is the story of the owner, who captures a beautiful view of a lake that can damage the cellphone?

Launching Gizmodo, Friday, June 12, the photo of the lake view which recently went viral as a dangerous wallpaper was made a portrait by an amateur photographer named Gaurav Agrawal. Initially, he just wanted to capture the moment the sun sets on a lake in Glacier National Park in Montana, United States (US).

"It was cloudy and cloudy, and we (Agrawal and his wife) thought there would not be a good view of the sunset. We were going to go first but then the scenery started to change," he said, Friday, June 12.

After capturing the beautiful moment and returning home, Agrawal started editing the photo in the Adobe Lightroom photo editing application. Where he exports his photos using the extra-wide HDR color space format. As a result, the landscape photo is very beautiful and looks good on the computer.

After finishing editing, Agrawal uploaded the photo on the photo sharing site, Flickr. It is most likely that from that site, the people who downloaded the photo for wallpaper had a strange event.

Not because the landscape photo is cursed or problematic, because some Android users experience hangs and crashes after using the photo as wallpaper. Not a few Android 10 users on Samsung devices have experienced damage, such as boot loops to factory reset.

When I tried to upload the original image (left) to Weibo, I found that its color to change (right). At this time, the image became harmless, but when uploaded to twitter, the original image still does not change color, still harmful. So I suspect it may be related to color gamut pic.twitter.com/0A1PlUqlpv

- Ice universe (UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

It is likely that the photo editing process carried out by Agrawal causes bugs in the image processing process on Android phones. Where the editing process in Lightroom will provide three color mode options for exporting the photos according to your choice.

"I didn't know the color format would cause this problem," he said, using an iPhone when trying out the photos for wallpaper.

On the other hand Agrawal has more than 10 thousand followers on the photography platform Flickr and his work is published by National Geographic magazine. He hopes that the photos of his portrait can go viral again, but not with a bad image.

"I hope my photo will go 'viral' for good reason. But maybe for another time I will pay attention to the photo format," said Agrawal.