Here is the first follow-up to my last post, 3 Steps to an Organized Desktop. Once you freed your desktop from all the clutter, it’s time to decorate it with a kick-ass pretty wallpaper.
There are at least a million sites that offer superb free wallpapers and I bet no matter how many I put in my list, you will find a few dozen equally awesome ones and list them in the comments. Please go ahead and do just that, we don’t want to miss out!
So here they are, my personal favourites…
Top 10 Wallpaper Resources:
Web 2.0 is ubiquitous and thus we have here an interactive community that engages in classifying, ranking, and distributing high resolution images for use as wallpapers. For a start you can pick a rough format – standard, widescreen, dual monitor, all or random. On the following page the filter can be fine-tuned to sort by most or least recent, highest or lowest rated, most or least popular items or by random. Overall you’ll find some of the hottest wallpapers on the web on this site. To rate an item click the green upturned arrow if you like it or the red downturned arrow if you don’t like it. Currently no sign-up is required.
(2) Foto Community
This is one of the largest archives for high quality photography with thousands of images and almost all of them qualify as wallpapers. You can browse by these categories: subjects, special, people, nude, nature, digi-art, youth, world, contest or gallery. The gallery contains the best photos as determined by user votes. To leave comments or vote, you need to register (free), however pictures can be downloaded without being a member (for private use only). Being a member, you can upload your own photos and see how others rate them.
The wallpaper visible in the screenshot of my desktop was Bluedrops from this amazing site.
(3) Wallpapr
Yet another web 2.0-ish site. This time a wallpaper search engine. Straight forward, simple, little you can tweak but therefore extremely easy to handle. Enter a search term, pick how many wallpapers you want to see – 20, 40 or 100 and then go.
(4) Wallpapers @ Customize.org
The most prominent feature of this site is the color-based search. Just pick a color from the random wallpaper color picker and all matching images will be listed. Alternatively the site offers search popular tags (or tag cloud).
(5) deviantART
Oldie but goldie. I’m sure most everyone here has visited deviantART before. It’s THE archive for all sorts of images – 50 million and counting and thus it’s nearly impossible not to find something you like. Best of all is the easy to use Categories menu. Browse through the large tree of sub-categories and quickly go back if you decide to view all sub-categories.
(6) N.Design Studio
This site does not have a huge selection, however they offer nothing but incredibly innovative and cool cartoonish wallpapers. Glitz and style for your desktop guaranteed!
This girl is all over the web to find the best and present it to you. Wallpapers can be browsed by category, resolution or featured artist, although there are many more artists represented than those listed as featured. Pixelgirl also presents some iPhone wallpapers.
(8) Desktography
The site describes itself as an exhibition, a showcase of nature themed desktop wallpapers created by designers worldwide. Currently, three exhibitions (years) with 10, 25 and 40 images respectively were released. A small but exclusive collection. Deskography uses a flash-based interface and wallpapers are downloaded as zip files containing all available resolutions. I’m impressed with both the site design and the picture quality.
(9) Veer
All wallpapers are the works of a single designer. Subsequently they are sorted by year. Since last year no less than eight different resolutions starting from as small as 320 x 480 (iPhone) and up to 1920 x 1200 pixel are available for every single new design. To download images an account needs to be registered with the site.
(10) Vladstudio
Currently over 450 unique wallpapers were made for this project by Russian digital artist Vlad Gerasimov. So take some time to dig through this wonderful archive. Images are available in low and high quality from 800 x 600 up to 1600 x 1200 pixel, as well as widescreen up to 2560 x 1600 pixel or dual-monitor up to 1680 x 1050 pixel. Thus virtually every screen will find a matching wallpaper. Additionally files can be downloaded for mobile phones, sent as e-card, bought as poster, and some are available to go with wallpaper clock software. Lower-quality images are free while quality-lossless and signature-free images cost from $8.99 for three months up to $29.99 for lifetime.
After browsing through all of these sites you will likely come back with at least a few dozen wallpapers you like. What to do? Download all your favorite wallpapers into a single folder and use a tool to change your wallpaper automatically!
Top 3 Wallpaper Switching Tools
- search & add all jpg, bmp, png and gif files to wallpaper list
- rearrange items in any way you like
- manage multiple wallpaper lists
- apply selected item from the list
- auto change desktop wallpaper after time, on startup, daily, never
- change login wallpaper
- resize wallpaper, only if deformation exceeds given percentage
- auto tile wallpaper, if smaller than given fraction
- auto-check screen resolution on startup or before changing
- auto-determine best background and icon color
- customize desktop icons
- add images from various locations
- supports gif, jpg, bmp and png files
- define stretch, center or tile for each wallpaper separately
- change wallpaper after time or on every startup
- apply selected image by double-clicking it
- manually switch wallpaper by left-clicking tray icon
- add wallpapers by folder or file from various locations
- supports jpg, bmp, gif, png and wmf files
- change wallpaper after time (15 minutes to 24 hours) or never
- stretch to fit desktop
- instantly set selected image as wallpaper
(1) Wallpaper Changer – This is the tool with the most features. It gives you total control over your wallpapers.
Features:
(2) ScrollWall – A plain simple alternative to Wallpaper Changer. Less options, less confusion, less possibilities to mess up and the tool I am using. ;)
Features:
(3) Wallpaper Juggler – This is Linda’s recommendation. An intermediate of the first two tools.
Features:
And this concludes the wallpaper special. In the coming posts I will cover more tools to enhance your desktop experience, so stay tuned!
In the meantime I would still like to see what your desktop looks like. Where did you find your wallpaper(s) and which tool(s) do you use on your desktop? Post a comment or mail me a screenshot. The coolest desktops will be featured on MUO.
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Hide 56 Comments
Nice Tina! I just wanted to add one I always use: deviantart.com
deviantART is number five in the list Dave. ;)
Oh Duhhhh – I just saw that now too. Good pick :)
Very good tina I go always here: wallpapers.org
Very good roundup!
hi this is amisha and I like it…!!!
Nice to see we are on number two of your list :) I would just like to remind you guys that all images on fotocommunity are copyright protected by the photographers on this site, but I’m sure that no one will mind using their images as wallpapers ;)
keep it up!
Andy
community managemen com
fotocommunity.com
A few more:
HDRWalls.com (HDR = High Dynamic Range)
Interfacelift.com
VistaWallpapers.ws
caedes.net is also a very good wallpaper site.
Thank you for the link.
from Brazil, Marco Gomes
CTO of the boo-box team
http://boo-box.com
I love to use the archives of National Geographic’s Photo of the Day to locate new desktop wallpaper. They also have photos catagorized by type, such as animals and landscapes.
Among the wallpaper switching tools, I still prefer Wallpaper Changer. It’s the only such tool that can also make your desktop icons transparent and change the desktop icon text color automatically so that these can be read no matter what the wallpaper colors are.
You’re absolutely right Edgar, it is the most powerful tool to manage your wallpapers. But on the other hand, if (!!!) you don’t have any icons on your desktop, you won’t need many of these extra features, so why bother.
my favorite for wallpaper and icons for PC and Mac, literally thousands
interfacelift.com
wallpapersmania.com
Go0od Site
I wanted to add another wallpaper changer which I’ve used for the past couple of year’s and am a huge fan of. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure others existed I’ve been so happy with Wallpaper Master (http://jamesgart.com/wallpaperchanger/). There’s now a paid version and the freeware version — I use the freeware version — but the freeware version has always had everything I always needed. Simple, small, takes very little resources and is the perfect solution to cycling through my 1000+ wallpapers I’ve collected.
My only problem now is that I received a widescreen monitor at Christmas, with a much higher resolution than my other monitor, so now most of my wallpapers don’t take up the whole screen =(. So now I’m in the market for downloading more wallpapers. Thanks much for this article!!
Where is the wallpaper of the city at night at the very top??
It’s from Socwall
http://wps.socwall.com/Buildings/General/200820022102-6282.jpg
Hey Aibek, the city wallpaper is gone… could you please post the link again?
Thanks if you can Aibek
Sorry mate, I don’t know any alternative link :-(
Thanks Aibek,,,, i think the blog makes the wallpaper look good anyway…. if you get it, please post back to this comment!
Aibek, your gonna love me,…….. found the wallpaper:
mcsearcher.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/dabf9bdf.jpg
:) :) :)
Hi Tina. I’m a big fan of makeuseof.com. However, I have one little problem. Would you PLEASE tell me where you got the cityscape wallpaper at the top of the page? I figured I’d look around before I bugged ya, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Here you go
http://wps.socwall.com/Buildings/General/200820022102-6282.jpg
Aibek, sorry to bother you!
This link does not work, and i MUST HAVE that wallpaper!
Please e-mail a link to it, or it, to me.
Funky_izlude@hotmail.com
great list, good quality wallpaper…..
Where did that awesome city shot at the top come from?
http://wps.socwall.com/Buildings/General/200820022102-6282.jpg
I use http://walyk.com/ for my wallpaper changer (winxp) and like it because it is good with subfolders. I’ll have to try the others mentioned here for comparison purposes.
For Windows, look at WallpaperCycler from nuonsoft.com
Includes a layout designer, effects, calendars, timed categories, RSS Feeds, webcam downloads and a screen saver too. The layout designer lets you put more than one wallpaper up at a time, from different categories, with borders, text, etc.
Fantastic design zen and lifestyle post. I really like Piknic for editing photos. It allows you to quickly and easily add text to a photo & edit the photo. Very hot. One of the coolest web 2.0 apps to come out in the recent past.
Deviant Art and the Flickr creative commons is likewise very cool.
How about http://nature.desktopnexus.com/? Each wallpaper can be downloaded in various sizes.
is it me or how do you download the wallpapers from Social Wallpapering?
Robert, you click through to the full size of a wallpaper you like (just click on the thumbnail), then right-click the image and save it to your harddisk. There is no download button, you have to do it manually.
I see what you mean now…
This didn’t happen when I wrote this post, but right-clicking and saving the image will result in saving a .php file, clearly not an image file type.
But there are at least two work-arounds. Instead of saving the image you can either copy and paste it into an image editing tool like Irfan View, then save it as jpg from there. Or, and much simpler, download the .php and rename the file extension to .jpg.
Tina,
That’s the issue – I had the PHP problem.
I’ll d/l as PHP and rename to JPG
Gee, whatever happened to good old Webshots??
Gr8888
I get my wallpaper and desktop backgrounds from here;
http://thewallpaperbackground.com/
Beware! Don’t bother to access to thewallpaperbackground.com/. Just a parking domain and this guy gotta be paid for every click.
Great source nice wallpapers thanks
“Social Wallpapering” downsizes larger images to my resolution ,and I can’t turn this off. The problem with this is that somehow it loses a *lot* quality and becomes blurry in doing so, much more so than it would if I had just downloaded the larger one and displayed it smaller.
My fav wallpaper site : wallmint.com
good url but wanna friend on mine..
Very nice site, Kamini. Here’s another: wallpaperloft.com.
Easy navigation makes it easy for users to find wallpapers in different resolutions. 47000 wallpapers and growing.
I get my wallpaper and desktop backgrounds from here;http://www.vistafeel.com
I get wonderful high-res photos from sxc.hu and crop to fit my resolution. I can add a calendar and get the image cropped at the same time at http://www.bighugelabs.com. Both of these are free; sxc.hu requires registration.
Hi, all..
I am new here.. I am looking for a free or reasonable price for my website backgrounds. I am looking for a wallpaper that would have a background of words my business name, etc. Your help would be greatly appreciated!
Jennifer
Hello Jennifer,
this post of mine is about desktop wallpapers. You’re asking for a website background. We only write about free tools, we don’t offer custom services ourselves.
My advice? You could create the website background yourself with a free image editing tool. You can browse MUO for a selection of online and offline tools (see link below).
If that is not an option, you should get in touch with a web designer. Google might point you into the right direction.
Good luck!
Free image editing tools reviewed on MUO:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/search/?cx=009717636731598800244%3Aqhe4rh7wuxs&cof=FORID%3A11&q=image+editing+tool&sa=%C2%A0#1269
This is a great list. I love having pictures of landscapes as a background and now I can do just that. Thanks so much for sharing these.
I get some HD (wallpaperwarp.com) wallpapers from here. I read something about the wallpapers being hand picked and only the best looking ones make it, anything that looks junky or ugly is removed…kinda cool!
join you. now, please rate my site:
wallpapers-dj.com
also i have added my own homepage maker, which can be done from wallpaper, that you select.
Do you want to improve your desktop, I invite you to my site itapetki.pl
many amazing free wallpapers
380 – that not many wallpapers. ;)
Hello and thank you for this article, there are some very good sites listed here :)
If you don’t mind, then I would also add one article, which contains many great websites and a little guide about how to choose the most suitable wallpapesr for your computer.
Thank you and here is the article: http://fr.ee/article/guide-to-free-wallpapers-and-screensavers