Where to Find New Wallpapers

It's been so long since we last recommended some wallpaper resources – both for PC and your mobile devices. Seeing that old sites get shut down and new services steadily appear, it might be time to refresh your bookmarks. Even if you already have a favorite wallpaper site, do take a look at this list – you never know what cool things you could discover.

We'll start with more specific wallpaper themes and their corresponding websites.

If you want to turn your desktop into a window to nature, National Geographic has a wallpaper section that is perfect for you. Their high-quality professional photography will impress you as you browse the wallpaper categories. There's also a Featured Wallpapers section, as well as Best Of compilations from previous months and years.

Gamers who appreciate concept and game art will surely enjoy Concept Art World and Dead End Thrills. The latter has been redesigned and the new layout is a bit inconvenient, but the images you'll find there are absolutely stunning. They are not wallpaper sites per se, but the images come in high resolution and are thus suitable for everyone's desktop.

Desktopography is something quite special. The site provides artistic wallpapers covering all themes – from nature and abstract art to space and technology – and showcasing the beauty of digital art. The wallpapers are divided into exhibitions by year, and artists can submit their work to be included in this year's exhibition. The range of available resolutions for each wallpaper should satisfy even those with huge screens.

deviantART is one of those places which require no introduction – you must've heard about this art community; perhaps you already use it as one of your wallpaper resources. There are several ways to find wallpapers on deviantART, and although having an account isn't a prerequisite, in some cases it's better to have one, because that way you can download images in a higher resolution than the one publicly available.

The simplest way is to perform a basic search for the wallpaper motif (for example, “New York”) and pick the images you like from the results. deviantART has a complex system of categories which can be accessed from the sidebar on the left to further tweak the search results. If you add the keyword “wallpaper” to your query, you might get better results in terms of image resolution. There's also a subcategory called Wallpaper (in All > Customization) which you can manually browse, search directly within it and sort the results by popularity.

Another way is to use a relatively new feature called Groups and look for wallpapers there. You can subscribe to different groups and have new wallpapers delivered to your account every day. Not all groups are equally active, so it's probably best to choose the ones with most members, as they are likely to receive more content.

Group names on deviantART are prepended by a # symbol, but their URL looks the same as yours, or any other profile URL. Take a look at #Wallpaper-Lounge, #Wallpaperism, #WorldWideWallpapers and #Only-Wallpapers to begin with; of course, there are many more. Specialized groups for architecture-, League of Legends- or Pokemon-themed wallpapers prove that there's something for everyone on deviantART.  

 

Reddit is a lively community where you can find a job, your long-lost uncle or someone to buy you a pizza, so it's only natural that they also offer wallpapers. True, it's rarely original content; people mostly link to images from other sites or upload their collections of wallpapers gathered from around the Web. Still, this is an interesting way to obtain new wallpapers as you browse through others' collections, and you can even ask people to upload or find wallpapers for you, which is convenient.

Visit r/WallpaperDump for collections and r/Wallpapers for individual images. As you probably know, there are literally hundreds of subreddits, and quite a few of them are dedicated to photography and image exchange, so you can use Reddit's search function to find specific images.

Since we're talking about search, it would be unfair to neglect Google and its Image Search function which can come in handy when you're looking for a wallpaper or trying to find a higher resolution of an image you wish to display on your desktop.

The procedure is simple – enter some keywords, for example “sunset wallpaper” and sort the results by size (either set the size as Large or write the exact resolution you want). These results are in fact a cross-section of (almost) the entire Web, so it's more practical to use Google Search than load and browse dozens of wallpaper websites.

I've saved the best for last – Wallbase is my top choice when it comes to wallpapers. Their motto is “We have wallpapers”, and boy, do they have them. Wallbase crawls 4chan boards /wg/ (Wallpaper General), /w/ (Wallpaper Anime) and /hr/ (High Resolution) and gets most of the wallpapers from there, though users can upload their own images directly to the site. The database is searchable and the wallpapers are tagged by users.

Registered users can create wallpaper collections (private or public) and access the forums, where it's possible to request wallpapers, exchange desktop customization tips and show off screenshots. Make sure to read the upload rules and respect copyright restrictions before adding images to Wallbase.

But wait, there's more! I should also mention Paperwall, which is similar to Wallbase, although it doesn't have as many images. Since we live in the repost age, it's not unusual to find the exact same images on all the websites listed here. The “culprits” are the users who submit the images; while Paperwall allows user uploads, they screen every image for quality and potential copyright infringement.

You can browse the wallpapers by category, popularity and resolution, use the search function or let Paperwall show you some random wallpapers. There are also featured wallpapers every day, as well as wallpaper packs freely available for download.

This list should equip you with more than enough wallpapers – you can have a new one every day or even create a wallpaper slideshow to keep your desktop exciting and fresh. Share your suggestions in the comments, or let me know on Twitter if there's a website I should have included. 

Ivana Isadora Devcic is a freelance writer, copyeditor and translator fluent in English, Swedish, Croatian and Norwegian. She's a Linux user and KDE fan interested in web design, productivity and personal branding. Ivana tweets about the world around her as @skadinna.