for anyone with the same problem, I add a border until the photo is larger than 1600x2650, at which point you can see the entire photo on the screen, as shown here:
This is one of the dumbest things I deal with on the pixel, although there are a lot of dumb things with this phone.
OP below:
ever since I got the pixel, one of the most frustrating non-Functionalities has been that I have to manually screenshot any picture that I want to make into a wallpaper background because my Google pixel 6 enlarges by about 3x any photo, I choose to make my wallpaper background and cannot make the picture smaller by pinching it smaller.
but now even if I save a screenshot, it blows it up more than 3x and I have to manually add a giant border around the picture in an external app so that the picture itself is much smaller if I want to see the entire picture on my phone wallpaper.
is this just some shitty thing with my phone or do all pixels do this?
Try doing it from the gallery, pick your image, then 3-dot menu, Set As, choose Wallpaper, it gives you a cropping box. Works perfectly for me, so far.
Edit: On some phones the cropping box isn't obvious - you grab the image and drag it around within the preview space.
That second photo in the previous comment is the preview pane and cropping tool you're taking about, unfortunately.
however i enter the wallpaper app, either through three dots, use as, wallpaper, or through the home screen long tap process i described, the preview pane pops up with a massively oversized picture that I'm allowed to crop but not resize.
Looks like my pixel had something wrong with its wallpaper app.
at least the border trick works.
i did ask about this on reddit a couple years ago and had a few people respond with the same issue, so it seems like some crappo software some of us are stuck with.
I don't want to factory reset the phone over this glitch, given how many other pixel bugs probably won't be fixed anyway even after the hassle of a reset.
it's bizarre, but I'm glad that it isn't affecting you or others.