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Ask HN: Best Source for Desktop Backgrounds

by hawktheslayer on 3/28/21, 6:07 PM with 59 comments

Any good recommendations for downloading desktop backgrounds? I'm looking for pictures or artwork to use for my dual screen monitors. But I find it difficult to find high res downloads from safe sources.

  • by lazyweb on 3/28/21, 8:47 PM

    Maybe somewhat nostalgic, but I remember cycling through many artworks by digitalblasphemy [1] during the early-mid 2000s. Honestly surprised to see there's still new content!

    [1] https://digitalblasphemy.com/

  • by HungSu on 3/28/21, 10:14 PM

    I'm going to go in totally the opposite direction of things suggested here.

    Personally, my backgrounds are things important to me, I easily forget about, and can't easily action.

    For example, one background is of my family, including my grandma who doesn't have any kind of social media or digital communication device at all. I'm in another country, so actions available to contact her are small. Reminders of her are infrequent - chats with my family are usually not about her. But I don't want to forget her, so into my slideshow rotation it goes.

    Another background is a theme park in Denmark featuring a 65m free fall tower into a huge safety net. International travel is hard now, and I know no one wants to do this theme park attraction with me. Odds are stacked against me to remember this thing, so into the slideshow.

    All the above pictures are low res and crap. But they're important to me. I do love beautiful high res backgrounds, but I've now decided they bring me less joy than the above.

  • by jandorn on 3/28/21, 9:30 PM

  • by hellokittah on 3/28/21, 7:54 PM

    The best one I found was https://Unsplash.com

    It has 1000s of high quality absolutely free images. You can even use them for commercial purposes for free legally.

  • by john-tells-all on 3/28/21, 7:37 PM

  • by kylelibra on 3/28/21, 8:03 PM

    https://wallhaven.cc has a solid selection and some basic filters.

  • by fiznool on 3/28/21, 9:46 PM

    As mentioned by others, the daily wallpapers supplied by bing are very nice. They aren’t 4k, but the 1080p images still look good on my 4k monitors.

    There are a number of scripts out there which download the ‘picture of the day’ and store it locally. You can then set your computer to scroll through these images every so often. Here’s the one I use: https://github.com/thejandroman/bing-wallpaper

  • by spartanatreyu on 3/28/21, 8:45 PM

    I'm going to say https://artstation.com

    In particular, I enjoy both the environmental concept art & design section and the matte painting sections:

    - https://www.artstation.com/channels/environmental_concept_de...

    - https://www.artstation.com/channels/matte_painting?sort_by=t...

  • by skunkworker on 3/28/21, 8:43 PM

    I really used to like https://interfacelift.com, but there hasn't been consistent uploads in about 2 years, though there are still a lot of great wallpapers on that site.

    The best in the past couple years has definitely been https://unsplash.com .

  • by svacko on 3/28/21, 7:35 PM

    I love the clean art on desktop backgrounds on http://simpledesktops.com - using it for years, besides already mentioned unsplash

  • by emsign on 3/28/21, 7:24 PM

    I love to browse the website of the Library of Congress, it has a lot of expressive historical photographs and you can download the high-res scans of the original plates. Of course, I have to process the images in an editor a bit, but I love the process. Generally I like "crafting" my desktop backgrounds myself.

    I also like to have photos I've taken as my background.

  • by Sunspark on 3/28/21, 8:50 PM

    I've been enjoying the Bing wallpaper app. Every day, it's something new that arrives! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/bing-wallpaper

  • by harel on 3/28/21, 9:30 PM

    Years ago I used DeviantArt quite a bit for that (https://www.deviantart.com/). I don't really know how good a resource it is these days but it's still a thing.

  • by roydivision on 3/29/21, 8:24 AM

    Slight tangent, I find it interesting how a lot of (non technical) people these days refer to their desktop background images as "screen savers". I am of a generation that remember when screen saver programs were widely used to prevent monitor burn in. I'm guessing that the term has persisted without the understanding of what it actually means because screen saver programs are rarely used any more, power saving features have taken over.

  • by m463 on 3/29/21, 2:12 AM

    It took me some time to learn a true thing about photography...

    When I was younger, I took a camera with me to some of the places I traveled. The first time I went out west, I saw these amazing open landscapes with skies that didn't end. And getting to the rockies or sierras, I was just awestruck.

    And I took pictures with my camera.

    But years later I looked at them, and the images of landscapes were "fine".

    However, the photos that stood the test of time were the ones with people in them. One family member, even scratching their nose was 10x a landscape. Even my motorcycle accidentally captured to the side of the image was better than a pristine landscape photo with perfect composition and lighting.

    So good background images capture things on more than one level.

    Another hack I found fun was to make background images in places very familiar to myself. Uniform photos of the stone walkway at my parents house, or the green grass of their backyard are abstract and non-distracting but familiar and calming backgrounds I like.

    There are some exceptions I do make. I do like some city images I find on wikipedia, such as:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Toledo_%...

    or the textured background of this image:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Unmatina...

  • by ddevault on 3/28/21, 9:38 PM

    I'll play the weeb card for this one. I like danbooru, which mainly categorizes fan art for anime and such, and is the gold standard in community image indexing and categorization. Their main site is NSFW, but you can access an SFW version via safebooru. Here's an example of a search which yields some wallpapers:

    https://safebooru.donmai.us/posts?tags=ratio%3A16%3A9+scener...

    The images are available in their original quality, and they have detailed tags. You can search by aspect ratio, width and height, and details of the image - "colorful", "scenery", "cityscape", and so on, or by the artist, copyright, or featured characters. You can search up to two terms for free, or pay a one-time fee of $20 for 6 terms, and $40 for twelve.

    The search features are documented here:

    https://safebooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/help%3Acheatsheet

  • by fbnlsr on 3/28/21, 6:41 PM

    If you're on Windows, I quite like Splash![0], it's an app that automatically loads pictures from Unsplash depending on keywords you choose.

    [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/splash-unsplash-wallpaper/...

  • by ly on 3/28/21, 7:37 PM

    If you're looking for artwork I can recommend visiting museum websites, some of them offer their collections online with high quality downloads.

    For example, the Rijksmuseum: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

  • by champagnepapi on 3/28/21, 7:34 PM

  • by gitgud on 3/29/21, 3:03 AM

    I use [1] variety which allows you to use, Flickr, Sub-Reddit's and other sites as download sources for backgrounds.

    [1] https://github.com/varietywalls/variety

  • by peterbecich on 3/28/21, 9:11 PM

  • by 153957 on 3/28/21, 8:52 PM

    I get mine from http://louie.world/wallpapers/

    A bunch of wallpapers related to specific movies or Disney, with various variations or themes per movie/series.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 3/29/21, 5:38 PM

    'safe'? ha Come on, we're talking about HD images which clearly there are some popular sources/google image search perhaps?

    Anyways, didn't hate this thread as much as I thought as I thought searching HN would turn up more recent ones but whatever....yeah, unsplash etc should be go-tos. But also saw this one https://www.dynamicwallpaper.club/

  • by cloudking on 3/28/21, 7:50 PM

  • by petecooper on 3/28/21, 8:15 PM

  • by cush on 3/28/21, 8:29 PM

  • by leokennis on 3/28/21, 7:47 PM

    I have a folder full of single color PNG files. Basically:

    - find a saturation and brightness level that is pleasing to you

    - now basically any hue you pick will be a pleasing color

    - create a number of 5000x5000 PNG files in those colors

    - use an image optimization tool (imgoptim etc.) and crush them to 1 KB files

    - let your OS cycle through the folder

  • by yakubin on 3/28/21, 8:54 PM

    I sometimes browse r/EarthPorn[1]. One in 30-40 photos satisfies me enough to be a desktop background candidate.

    [1]: <https://old.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/>

  • by ayoisaiah on 3/28/21, 9:50 PM

    I maintain my own Unsplash collection here: https://unsplash.com/collections/998309/stellar-photos

  • by skanga on 3/28/21, 9:53 PM

    On a somewhat related note...

    Does anyone have a source for good Terminal backgrounds? Terminal backgrounds differ from Desktop backgrounds in that they need to allow easy reading of text - so Desktop backgrounds aren't suitable for this ...

  • by roland35 on 3/29/21, 11:48 AM

    InterfaceLift is my favorite for landscape photography:

    https://interfacelift.com/

    Grab images while you can though, this site does go down occasionally.

  • by rahimnathwani on 3/29/21, 3:40 AM

    If you use a tiling window manager (and why wouldn't you?!) you don't need a background.

    I guess a lot of people here use a Mac. Amethyst for MacOS provides the same basic features as i3.

  • by nicholasjarr on 3/29/21, 12:20 AM

    I use https://muzei.co/ on my phone and I wrote a script to fetch the today picture on my desktop

  • by rcarmo on 3/29/21, 6:50 AM

    I used Trianglify to generate some 60-odd backgrounds and have stuck to them (rotating automatically) over quite some time.

  • by offsky on 3/29/21, 5:41 AM

    NASA releases high resolution images from the Hubble telescope. If you like space stuff I highly recommend checking it out.

  • by mguerville on 3/28/21, 8:29 PM

    I like the designer wallpaper monthly series from DesignMilk, over the years I’ve downloaded a bunch and they are my go to

  • by mikewarot on 3/28/21, 9:37 PM

    Don't forget Flickr, which is still alive, and still has strong support for the Creative Commons.

    Here's a picture of clover I use as my background, it's dark enough I can still see my icons, yet interesting.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/50131172608/in/date...

    Disclosure: I took the photo.

  • by zepearl on 3/28/21, 9:08 PM

  • by mak3141 on 3/28/21, 7:53 PM

    I really like https://nik.bot.nu/

  • by cropcirclbureau on 3/28/21, 9:54 PM

  • by ninetax on 3/28/21, 8:35 PM

    I rotate pictures from a bike trip I took a few years ago

  • by sgt on 3/28/21, 9:24 PM

    Been using the standard macOS Mojave desert background for 3 years and counting. Not planning on changing.

  • by rabbitrecon on 3/29/21, 2:50 PM

    Furaffinity.net :3