Alan Henry
Personalizing your desktop starts with customizing your wallpaper. Finding good wallpapers for your desktop however, isn't difficult, but everyone has an opinion about which sites are the best to visit for the best selection of wallpapers for high-resolution displays, multiple screens, or the best imagery. Here are five of the best wallpaper resources, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the week, we asked you which sites you visit when it's time to refresh your wallpaper. Hundreds of nominations later, here's a look at the top five.
Best Wallpaper Site?Read More
Photo by William Hook.
The poll is closed and the votes are tallied. To find out which of this week's contestants took the top prize, head over to our weekly Hive Five Followup post!
Most Popular Wallpaper Site: Digital BlasphemyRead More
Wallbase
The first time we looked at your favorite wallpaper sites, WallBase didn't exist. Now that it does, it's rapidly become one of the web's most popular sources for wallpapers. The site has a huge database of images, allows you to search by keyword, color, or popular tag, filter for just high resolution images, see similar wallpapers to ones you like, or just browse around. You can also screen for different types of images, work-safe images, even your preferred aspect ratio. Sign up for an account and you have the ability to set all of these filters to your own select preferences and save them so you never have to set them again. You can also subscribe to other users' uploads, save a list of favorite wallpapers that you can download later.
Five Best Wallpaper SitesRead More
InterfaceLift
InterfaceLift has a long and storied reputation of being a great destination for wallpapers that can match any resolution, any aspect ratio, and even wallpapers for multi-monitor setups. Where many other wallpaper sites aggregate tons of wallpapers of all different types, InterfaceLift's strength is in its rich database of great photos, photo information for each wallpaper, and gorgeous natural scenery and vistas that you can use even on your office PC. InterfaceLift also sports mobile wallpapers with varying resolutions, and gives you the ability to filter to see any or all of them. You can also snag the Backdrops app for iOS to bring InterfaceLift's catalog to your iPhone or iPad.
SimpleDesktops
If nature photos, fancy graphics, movie stills, or fantasy 3D vistas aren't your cup of tea, SimpleDesktops is the site for you. The site specializes in single-color wallpapers or desktops with simple graphics and patterns that are designed to decorate your desktop with some visual interest without distracting you from your work. The database isn't as large as many other wallpaper sites, but the wallpapers there are elegant and still fun to browse. Each wallpaper is credited with the designer behind it, and you can submit your own to the site's curated list. If you're a fan of minimal desktops, SimpleDesktops is heaven.
DeviantArt
DeviantArt's strength is in its community and the talented artists that call the site home. DeviantArt has wallpapers and images for all interests. It's worth noting that DeviantArt is far from a wallpaper site, and instead is host to the portfolios of thousands of different artists and their types of art. Wallpapers and desktop images are just one type of art you can find there, and you'll find them in abundance. You have to dig down to get to the wallpaper category to find them, but once you do, there are plenty to choose from and image categories you can filter against. Register for a free account at DeviantArt and you can follow artists who post work you enjoy, save wallpapers to download later, and leave comments.
Digital Blasphemy
If you're old enough, you might remember Digital Blasphemy when it arrived on the web as one of the few places you could download 3D, computer-generated artistic wallpapers of strange, fantasy, alien worlds and space-scapes, mysterious ruins and lost civilations, and of course, the iconic glowing mushrooms. The site is still alive and kicking with tons of gorgeous new art posted regularly. There's a wealth of CG art available and a long, deep back-catalog of images going back for years, all the work of one talented artist. Many of the site's wallpapers are free, but if you sign up for a membership (starting at $20/yr) you get access to the newest wallpapers as they're posted, dual-monitor wallpapers, rendered background scenes for your PS3, Chrome and Firefox themes, and tons of other high-resolution and mobile wallpapers that aren't available to free users.
Now that you've seen the top give nominees, it's time to put them to an all out vote to decide the winner.
Honorable mentions this week go out to The Paper Wall, another great new wallpaper site that allows you to search by category, type, and resolution. Google Images is also worth mentioning as an honorable mention—many of you noted that you just use Google Images to find great wallpapers. Also worth noting is 4Walled and 4Chan's wallpaper forum, both of which have great selections (often NSFW) and communities that demand only the best and highest-resolution wallpapers. All three earned a ton of votes, just not enough to make the top five.
Have something to say about the top five that we didn't mention? Have an awesome wallpaper to share? Share your thoughts (and wallpapers, if you like) in the comments below.
