Best Places to Get Awesome Desktop Wallpapers
If you sit at your computer or phone for hours (and let’s be true – you are), you can save interesting things with your desktop wallpaper. If you want to go beyond what’s included in your operating system or old photographs from film, you can find thousands upon thousands of alternatives on the Internet.
So, whether you love changing beautiful desktop wallpapers or you just want something minimal that you are going to open windows over anyway, here are some of our wallpaper options.
Wallpaper
WallpaperStock made our list because of the huge selection of free wallpapers in many categories. You can download wallpapers for specific mobile devices, screen resolutions, and social media platforms. While you can sort the best wallpapers or use the shuffle feature, there is no easy way to browse by category other than searching for something specific and clicking on the category tags.
In addition, the site displays ads, which is a bit distracting. But in general, the selection is worth a look.
Social wallpaper
Making wallpapers for social media started many years ago with a Digg-like approach to create a user-customizable collection of wallpapers organized by quality based on user voices. The Social Wallpapering community may not be big enough to really organize the wallpaper this way, but the collection of images available is huge and is regularly updated with new content.
The sorting by category feature is a little awkward, but you can also upload your own images or create an account to save your favorites.
Deviantart wallpaper
DeviantArt is a huge community of artists and fans, and among the many things you can find on the site, there is a huge collection of wallpapers . It has everything from photographs and illustrations to abstract digital art – even fantasy or fan art from your favorite movie, video game, or comic book franchise. You can choose a category, sort by newest or most popular, or find something specific in the site’s huge database.
You can’t filter specifically by resolution or display size, and the categories aren’t cropped, so it can be tricky to find exactly what you’re looking for. However, it has always been one of our favorite desktop websites .
Desktop Nexus
One of our favorite underrated desktop wallpaper sites , Desktop Nexus has a community of over a million users who together have downloaded and voted nearly 1.5 million wallpapers. Everything in Desktop Nexus is neatly organized into categories, and if you select one category, many subcategories will open underneath (and you can view them all here ).
All wallpapers are sorted by the voices of the members, so you can sort them by popularity or newness, or search for something specific. For your information, you must be a member for at least a month or upload 25 of your own wallpapers to vote for others.
HDWallpapers.net
HDWallpapers.net is updated daily with high resolution photos, illustrations and more. You can sort by favorites, popular or latest, browse by category, or search for something specific. When downloading, you can select a specific mobile device, computer screen resolution, or even a social media platform (like Facebook cover).
You don’t need to create an account to download wallpapers, but you can download or save your favorites.
Wallhaven
Wallhaven started out as a project to replace / restore / improve Wallbase, which is now dead, but was once one of our favorite wallpaper sites just because it scraped wallpaper from many sources that we liked as well.
The community is huge, the database is large, and once you have a free account, you can browse by tags or popularity (Toplist option), filter SFW images (or not), select specific permissions or roll the dice with the Random function and see. what you get. Best of all, the site has infinite scrolling, so you don’t have to flip through multiple pages to view more wallpapers.
Elevator interface
IntefaceLift – another old (and all the favorite ) standard in the community of wallpaper, which has long been the main source of beautiful wallpapers with natural scenery , photo wallpaper and many others. Plus, the site isn’t just about wallpapers: like DeviantArt, there is a huge community of people making icon packs, system themes, and more.
InterfaceLift will automatically detect your screen resolution and show you the wallpaper accordingly – you can also sort by resolution or device. The site may not have a large selection or clipped images from others on this list, and is not updated as regularly, but you can see everything about the photos you upload, including the cameras that were used to capture them, who took them, and their comments.
Simple desktops
If you are not interested in photography, abstract art, or other downloaded desktop images, Simple Desktops is more for you. All wallpapers on Simple Desktops are quite minimalistic and include patterns, text snippets or iconographic images that look great and say a lot, not to mention a lot. They will be handpicked and handpicked because they are attractive but not busy or distracting – which might be ideal if you want to decorate your desk without standing out too much in the office or distracting yourself with what’s on it.
Simple Desktops has options for mobile devices via Android and iOS apps. There is also a desktop app for Mac. Finally, all of their images are captured, so you can learn a little about the artist who made them.
Digital blasphemy
No discussion of wallpaper sites is complete without stopping at Digital Blasphemy , run by Lifehacker friend Ryan Bliss since 1999. Its origins date back to the early web as one of the first places to find truly unique and interesting 3D images and unique wallpapers that weren’t photographs. Today, his current iteration combines everything that made him great years ago with modern fantasy art, landscapes, sci-fi vistas, and nature scenes.
Only a small fraction of the wallpapers available on Digital Blasphemy are available for free – the real wealth of its catalog is hidden behind the $ 20 a year membership plan (different tiers have more perks, and you can see them all here ). In addition, Digital Blasphemy has wallpapers for multiple monitors and mobile devices, as well as Digital Blasphemy apps for Windows, iOS, and Android.
Automatic wallpaper change
While all of the above are great sources of new wallpapers to decorate your desktop, sometimes the best sources are the ones you install on your computer and forget about and just let the wallpaper come to you. Mac OS has a built-in wallpaper changer (Preferences> Desktop & Screensaver> Change Picture) that cycles through the images on the Apple desktop or the photos on your computer.
There are many third-party apps out there, but John’s Background Switcher is one of our favorite wallpaper managers, with a free version for Windows and a paid option for Mac. While it’s great with your own loaded desktops, it’s even better if you use integration with photo services (Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and Google Photos, to name a few) or RSS feeds and let the app load and switch for you. …
Irvue for Mac integrates with Unsplash and can change wallpaper at intervals from 30 minutes to a month. Windows users can also use DisplayFusion , which switches desktop images based on customized profiles.
We cannot include all of our favorite wallpapers and desktop services on this list. If you’re still looking for more options, check out this post on Big Think , which has direct links to downloadable image archives from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery, Google Art Project, and other museums around the world. We also recommend quickly browsing the Bing Wallpaper Gallery .
Finally, if you’re specifically looking for dual- or triple-monitor desktops, we must make a special mention of Dual Monitor Backgrounds (DMB) , which have been satisfying this need for years.
This article was originally published in 2016 and was updated in November 2019 with the most recent resources and information.