Ask HN: Best Source for Desktop Backgrounds
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.
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.
It has 1000s of high quality absolutely free images. You can even use them for commercial purposes for free legally.
It's great that you don't need to sign in or do captchas.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinboxes/
* Wikimedia isn't bad 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-o...
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
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...
The best in the past couple years has definitely been https://unsplash.com .
I also like to have photos I've taken as my background.
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...
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:
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/splash-unsplash-wallpaper/...
For example, the Rijksmuseum: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
A bunch of wallpapers related to specific movies or Disney, with various variations or themes per movie/series.
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/
- 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
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 ...
Grab images while you can though, this site does go down occasionally.
I guess a lot of people here use a Mac. Amethyst for MacOS provides the same basic features as i3.
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.