Too much Internet free time » wallpaper

Find your free wallpapers with Google

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:07:12 +0000

If you’re like most people, you’d like to have pretty wallpaper on your desktop background. You can always go to wallpaper web sites but most of them are choke-full of ads and they always provide the same usual set. How about getting new ones?

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

Free wallpapers on Google

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

The space shuttle as wallpaper

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:36:49 +0000

The larger our displays, the tougher it gets to find adequate wallpapers. NASA (through a sélection from Chamorro) comes to our resscue with these exceptionnaly beautiful high-resolution images. Our computer will have a hig-technology look even in 4000×3000 pixels.

Atlantis Space Shuttle

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

Planetary pictures and wallpapers

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:45:19 +0000

I consider that the most useful and often the most interesting wallpapers for your computer desktop are images that are relatively feature-less. A picture full of little details continuously grabbing your attention is a major nuisance. It’s much better to have either a very smooth image or a photo containing a lot of continuous tones.

Windows 7 official wallpapers

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

800×600
1024×768
1152×864
1280×960
1440×1080
1600×1200
1920×1440
2048×1536
2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

Free nature wallpapers: Sand

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:01:11 +0000

Some abstract images of sand. Shot in Lagoa do Peixe (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) in 2008. To me, they looked a little like some satellite photos of the planet Mars.

Click on the thumbnails if you want to access the 1280*1024 versions

Those photos can be used freely for your own wallpaper (on your own computer).