A wallpaper remains on the whole unchanged under certain isometries, starting with certain translations that confer on the wallpaper a repetitive nature. One of the reasons to be unchanged under certain translations is that it covers the whole plane. No mathematical object in our minds is stuck onto a motionless wall! On the contrary an observer or his eye is motionless in front of a transformation, which glides or rotates or flips a wallpaper, eventually could distort it, but that would be out of our subject.
If an isometry leaves unchanged a given wallpaper, then the inverse isometry keeps it also unchanged, like translation   on image 1, 3 or 4, or a ± 120° rotation around a point like S  on image 3 or 4. If they have both this property to leave unchanged a wallpaper, two isometries composed in one or the other order have then this same property to leave unchanged the wallpaper. To be exhaustive about the concepts of group and subgroups under the function composition, represented by the circle shaped symbol ⵔ, here is a traditional truism in mathematics:  everything remains itself under the identity transformation. This identity function can be called translation of zero vector or rotation of 360°.
A glide can be represented by one or several arrows if parallel and of same length and same sense, in same way a wallpaper can be represented either by a few patterns or by only one pattern, considered as a pseudo‑tile imagined repeated edge‑to‑edge with an infinite number of replicas. Image 3 shows two patterns with two different contents, and the one in dark dashed lines or one of its images under  represents the same wallpaper on the following image 4, by disregarding the colors. Certainly a color is perceived subjectively whereas a wallpaper is an ideal object, however any color can be seen as a label that characterizes certain surfaces, we might think of a hexadecimal code of color as a label specific to certain zones. It may be added that a well‑known theorem deals with colors.
Groups are registered in the catalog by examining properties of a parallelogram, edge‑to‑edge with its replicas. For example its diagonals intersect at their common midpoints, center and symmetry point of any parallelogram, not necessarily symmetry point of its content. Other example, the midpoint of a full side shared by two patterns is the center of a new repetitive parallelogram formed by the two together, center which is not necessarily symmetry point of the content of this double parallelogram. Other possible symmetry point, two patterns symmetric one to the other with respect to their common vertex form together a new repetitive surface, the center of which is not necessarily symmetry point of its content.
Certain rotational symmetries are possible only for certain shapes of pattern. For example on image 2, a Pythagorean tiling is sometimes called pinwheel tilings because of its rotational symmetry of 90 degrees about the center of a tile, either small or large, or about the center of any replica of tile, of course. Also when two equilateral triangles form edge‑to‑edge a rhombic pattern, like on image 4 or 5 (future image 5), a rotational symmetry of 120 degrees about a vertex of a 120° angle, formed by two sides of pattern, is not always a symmetry point of the content of the regular hexagon formed by three patterns together sharing a vertex, because it does not always contain the same motif.