A way around the wallpaper-sizing issue on iPad

This is not the first time Apple has let oddities in an OS regarding wallpaper. (In OS X, for many years, you couldn't use a portrait-oriented image if it was taller than the screen, it would show up cropped. You just couldn't scale it down. This was finally fixed a couple of years ago.)
This fix unfortunately demands a bit of knowledge of an image-editing app. But I made big images of a pleasant, low-contrast pattern, and put the desired image in the middle of it. This will let the essential part of the image show up in full on the iPad.
They are bigger than Blogger lets me post (max 1600px), but you can get four of them I have made, here.)

It's important that the bigger image is roughly square, since iOS wants both dimensions to fit within the screen.

It actually was like this in early versions of iOS, then it was fixed in iOS 5 or 6, and I was so happy.

The pattern is one I made myself with a pattern/texture plugin for photoshop, in the early days of OS X. It was called Terrazo from Xaostools and was wonderful. It made repeating and tiling patterns based on any graphic, and the ways you could repeat them were manyfold. I don't think it works anymore. I really wish I knew of a similar app/plugin.