8 ms·

Ask HN: Best Source for Desktop Backgrounds

72 points by hawktheslayer 6y ago

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.

fbnlsr 6y ago
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/9phttwjgg81f?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/splash-unsplash-wallpaper/...
- hawktheslayer 6y ago
  Thanks, I didn't know about Splash, and I like it! Too bad my system admin disabled the Microsoft store.
  - ryankrage77 6y ago
    If you can get hold of the .appx file from another source, you may be able to install it via powershell.
emsign 6y ago
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.
- infoseek12 6y ago
  Ya, the Library of Congress collection is great, it’s practically the only place I’ve been able to find images of art that is at least 3840 pixels wide that doesn’t need to be upscaled for 4K monitors. Does anyone know any other sources of high resolution images of classic art? All of the photos on museum sites like the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum are really low quality.
champagnepapi 6y ago
https://unsplash.com/ https://unsplash.com/
svacko 6y ago
I love the clean art on desktop backgrounds on http://simpledesktops.com http://simpledesktops.com - using it for years, besides already mentioned unsplash
ly 6y ago
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 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
john-tells-all 6y ago
* https://www.catsonsynthesizersinspace.com/ https://www.catsonsynthesizersinspace.com/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinboxes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinboxes/ * Wikimedia isn't bad https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Background_images https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Background_image... * Wikipedia has tons of stunning hi-res artwork, as does... * Wikiart! Example: Max Ernst https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/the-angel-of-the-home-or-the-triumph-of-surrealism-1937 https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/the-angel-of-the-home-o...
leokennis 6y ago
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
cloudking 6y ago
For multiple monitor setups https://www.dualmonitorbackgrounds.com/ https://www.dualmonitorbackgrounds.com/ https://www.triplemonitorbackgrounds.com https://www.triplemonitorbackgrounds.com
mak3141 6y ago
I really like https://nik.bot.nu/ https://nik.bot.nu/
hellokittah 6y ago
The best one I found was https://Unsplash.com https://Unsplash.com It has 1000s of high quality absolutely free images. You can even use them for commercial purposes for free legally.
- electricant 6y ago
  You've been faster than me. Great suggestion. There's tons of free and high quality backgrounds on there. There are also apps for your favorite smartphone OS avaliable. https://unsplash.com/apps https://unsplash.com/apps
  - billylo 6y ago
    Mac too. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unsplash-wallpapers/id1284863847?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unsplash-wallpapers/id12848638...
- pimlottc 6y ago
  Unsplash is also a great resource for slide deck backgrounds and hero images.
- HKH2 6y ago
  Thanks! It's great that you don't need to sign in or do captchas.
kylelibra 6y ago
https://wallhaven.cc https://wallhaven.cc has a solid selection and some basic filters.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  This is by far the one I use most. Great selection, relatively few dupes, decent tagging, and not too many low quality upscales.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  This is my goto. I think they do (or used) to scrape 4chan for the wallpapers.
petecooper 6y ago
https://pixabay.com/ https://pixabay.com/ https://burst.shopify.com/ https://burst.shopify.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/
mguerville 6y ago
I like the designer wallpaper monthly series from DesignMilk, over the years I’ve downloaded a bunch and they are my go to
cush 6y ago
Justin Maller http://justinmaller.com/ http://justinmaller.com/
ninetax 6y ago
I rotate pictures from a bike trip I took a few years ago
toinebeg 6y ago
no kidding, Wallpaper/General from 4chan : https://boards.4chan.org/wg/ https://boards.4chan.org/wg/
skunkworker 6y ago
I really used to like https://interfacelift.com 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 https://unsplash.com .
spartanatreyu 6y ago
I'm going to say https://artstation.com 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_design?sort_by=trending https://www.artstation.com/channels/environmental_concept_de... - https://www.artstation.com/channels/matte_painting?sort_by=trending https://www.artstation.com/channels/matte_painting?sort_by=t...
lazyweb 6y ago
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/ https://digitalblasphemy.com/
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  I'm still a subscriber there actually. The guy behind it is going strong and keeps trying new things. Would highly recommend if you like his style.
- bkuehl 6y ago
  Haven't visited in many years but so glad to hear they are still up! What a classic.
Sunspark 6y ago
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 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/bing-wallpaper
- slenk 6y ago
  I just wish it would set a different wallpaper per monitor
153957 6y ago
I get mine from http://louie.world/wallpapers/ http://louie.world/wallpapers/ A bunch of wallpapers related to specific movies or Disney, with various variations or themes per movie/series.
yakubin 6y ago
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/ https://old.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/>
zepearl 6y ago
https://bingwallpaper.anerg.com https://bingwallpaper.anerg.com
peterbecich 6y ago
Wikimedia Commons panoramas: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures/Places/Panoramas https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures...
sgt 6y ago
Been using the standard macOS Mojave desert background for 3 years and counting. Not planning on changing.
jandorn 6y ago
https://unsplash.com https://unsplash.com https://burst.shopify.com https://burst.shopify.com https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com https://stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io https://www.reshot.com https://www.reshot.com
harel 6y ago
Years ago I used DeviantArt quite a bit for that (https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/). I don't really know how good a resource it is these days but it's still a thing.
- collin128 6y ago
  This comment brings me back to XP
  - harel 6y ago
    In my case it brings me back to when Ubuntu was shipped on a free CD-Rom from Canonical.
- roydivision 6y ago
  I go here a lot for backgrounds, good resource.
mikewarot 6y ago
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/datetaken-public/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/50131172608/in/date... Disclosure: I took the photo.
ddevault 6y ago
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+scenery 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 https://safebooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/help%3Acheatsheet
fiznool 6y ago
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 https://github.com/thejandroman/bing-wallpaper
ayoisaiah 6y ago
I maintain my own Unsplash collection here: https://unsplash.com/collections/998309/stellar-photos https://unsplash.com/collections/998309/stellar-photos
skanga 6y ago
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 ...
cropcirclbureau 6y ago
https://goodfon.com/ https://goodfon.com/
HungSu 6y ago
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.
nicholasjarr 6y ago
I use https://muzei.co/ https://muzei.co/ on my phone and I wrote a script to fetch the today picture on my desktop
m463 6y ago
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_%2837737041515%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Toledo_%... or the textured background of this image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Unmatinapresledeluge.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Unmatina...
gitgud 6y ago
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 https://github.com/varietywalls/variety
rahimnathwani 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
offsky 6y ago
NASA releases high resolution images from the Hubble telescope. If you like space stuff I highly recommend checking it out.
- offsky 6y ago
  https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/images https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/images
rcarmo 6y ago
I used Trianglify to generate some 60-odd backgrounds and have stuck to them (rotating automatically) over quite some time.
roydivision 6y ago
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.
roland35 6y ago
InterfaceLift is my favorite for landscape photography: https://interfacelift.com/ https://interfacelift.com/ Grab images while you can though, this site does go down occasionally.
rabbitrecon 6y ago
Furaffinity.net :3
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
'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/ https://www.dynamicwallpaper.club/

72 points by hawktheslayer 6y ago

fbnlsr 6y ago

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/9phttwjgg81f?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/splash-unsplash-wallpaper/...

hawktheslayer 6y ago
Thanks, I didn't know about Splash, and I like it! Too bad my system admin disabled the Microsoft store.
- ryankrage77 6y ago
  If you can get hold of the .appx file from another source, you may be able to install it via powershell.

emsign 6y ago

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.

infoseek12 6y ago
Ya, the Library of Congress collection is great, it’s practically the only place I’ve been able to find images of art that is at least 3840 pixels wide that doesn’t need to be upscaled for 4K monitors. Does anyone know any other sources of high resolution images of classic art? All of the photos on museum sites like the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum are really low quality.

champagnepapi 6y ago

https://unsplash.com/ https://unsplash.com/

svacko 6y ago

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

ly 6y ago

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 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

john-tells-all 6y ago

* https://www.catsonsynthesizersinspace.com/ https://www.catsonsynthesizersinspace.com/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinboxes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinboxes/ * Wikimedia isn't bad https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Background_images https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Background_image... * Wikipedia has tons of stunning hi-res artwork, as does... * Wikiart! Example: Max Ernst https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/the-angel-of-the-home-or-the-triumph-of-surrealism-1937 https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/the-angel-of-the-home-o...

leokennis 6y ago

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

cloudking 6y ago

For multiple monitor setups https://www.dualmonitorbackgrounds.com/ https://www.dualmonitorbackgrounds.com/ https://www.triplemonitorbackgrounds.com https://www.triplemonitorbackgrounds.com

mak3141 6y ago

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

hellokittah 6y ago

The best one I found was https://Unsplash.com https://Unsplash.com It has 1000s of high quality absolutely free images. You can even use them for commercial purposes for free legally.

electricant 6y ago
You've been faster than me. Great suggestion. There's tons of free and high quality backgrounds on there. There are also apps for your favorite smartphone OS avaliable. https://unsplash.com/apps https://unsplash.com/apps
- billylo 6y ago
  Mac too. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unsplash-wallpapers/id1284863847?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unsplash-wallpapers/id12848638...
pimlottc 6y ago
Unsplash is also a great resource for slide deck backgrounds and hero images.
HKH2 6y ago
Thanks! It's great that you don't need to sign in or do captchas.

kylelibra 6y ago

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

kitsunesoba 6y ago
This is by far the one I use most. Great selection, relatively few dupes, decent tagging, and not too many low quality upscales.
runawaybottle 6y ago
This is my goto. I think they do (or used) to scrape 4chan for the wallpapers.

petecooper 6y ago

https://pixabay.com/ https://pixabay.com/ https://burst.shopify.com/ https://burst.shopify.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/

mguerville 6y ago

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

cush 6y ago

Justin Maller http://justinmaller.com/ http://justinmaller.com/

ninetax 6y ago

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

toinebeg 6y ago

no kidding, Wallpaper/General from 4chan : https://boards.4chan.org/wg/ https://boards.4chan.org/wg/

skunkworker 6y ago

I really used to like https://interfacelift.com 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 https://unsplash.com .

spartanatreyu 6y ago

I'm going to say https://artstation.com 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_design?sort_by=trending https://www.artstation.com/channels/environmental_concept_de... - https://www.artstation.com/channels/matte_painting?sort_by=trending https://www.artstation.com/channels/matte_painting?sort_by=t...

lazyweb 6y ago

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/ https://digitalblasphemy.com/

blacktriangle 6y ago
I'm still a subscriber there actually. The guy behind it is going strong and keeps trying new things. Would highly recommend if you like his style.
bkuehl 6y ago
Haven't visited in many years but so glad to hear they are still up! What a classic.

Sunspark 6y ago

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 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/bing-wallpaper

slenk 6y ago
I just wish it would set a different wallpaper per monitor

153957 6y ago

I get mine from http://louie.world/wallpapers/ http://louie.world/wallpapers/ A bunch of wallpapers related to specific movies or Disney, with various variations or themes per movie/series.

yakubin 6y ago

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/ https://old.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/>

zepearl 6y ago

https://bingwallpaper.anerg.com https://bingwallpaper.anerg.com

peterbecich 6y ago

Wikimedia Commons panoramas: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures/Places/Panoramas https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures...

sgt 6y ago

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

jandorn 6y ago

https://unsplash.com https://unsplash.com https://burst.shopify.com https://burst.shopify.com https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com https://stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io https://www.reshot.com https://www.reshot.com

harel 6y ago

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

collin128 6y ago
This comment brings me back to XP
- harel 6y ago
  In my case it brings me back to when Ubuntu was shipped on a free CD-Rom from Canonical.
roydivision 6y ago
I go here a lot for backgrounds, good resource.

mikewarot 6y ago

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/datetaken-public/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/50131172608/in/date... Disclosure: I took the photo.

ddevault 6y ago

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

fiznool 6y ago

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 https://github.com/thejandroman/bing-wallpaper

ayoisaiah 6y ago

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

skanga 6y ago

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 ...

cropcirclbureau 6y ago

https://goodfon.com/ https://goodfon.com/

HungSu 6y ago

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.

nicholasjarr 6y ago

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

m463 6y ago

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_%2837737041515%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Toledo_%... or the textured background of this image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Unmatinapresledeluge.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Unmatina...

gitgud 6y ago

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 https://github.com/varietywalls/variety

rahimnathwani 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

offsky 6y ago

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

offsky 6y ago
https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/images https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/images

rcarmo 6y ago

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

roydivision 6y ago

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.

roland35 6y ago

InterfaceLift is my favorite for landscape photography: https://interfacelift.com/ https://interfacelift.com/ Grab images while you can though, this site does go down occasionally.

rabbitrecon 6y ago

Furaffinity.net :3

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

'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/ https://www.dynamicwallpaper.club/