I source solid wallpapers from a couple of OSes for use in macOS:
* https://stories.gregannandale.com/raspberry-pi-desktop-image...
* Ubuntu has some default hits (and misses): https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/every-ubuntu-default-wallpaper
* Ubuntu hosts a wallpaper competition (most years) for photographers all over the world: https://ubuntu.com/blog/winners-of-the-21-10-wallpaper-compe...
* and here's a somewhat-outdated repo of wallpapers from a bunch of Linux distros: https://github.com/LinuxKits/Distro-wallpapers -- I'm especially fond of the Elementary OS images.
A lot of the wallpapers there come from other sources like Flickr, interfacelift, Reddit, 4chan (for better or for worse, /wg/ isn't too bad), or just direct uploads.
I wouldn't say credit is preserved particularly well at all times, which is a shame, but it is just a reverse image search away usually to find the original.
One thing I appreciate is that its users do a decent job of tagging images so it’s easy to find all the work of a particular artist or location.
On the plus side, Tineye can be quite helpful for finding things in their original size.
And I only use 1080p!
Use the HST and JWST pages for space wallpaper sources[1][2]. Make sure to check only the 'observation' checkbox; this filters out all the infographics, 'artist's impressions', simulations, etc.
I suggest downloading the TIFF, opening this in some photo post-processing program (Lightroom, Darktable, RawTherapee, etc), and applying mild tone and colour adjustments, and then cropping to the exact resolution of your display.
I get much better results this way.
My favorite source for all space-related pictures are the Apollo flight journal photography archives[1].
I’m not sure if there’s a better resource, as-is you have to click through to see a higher resolution version to check if the picture is even in focus, but honestly that adds to the fun of it :)
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/history/afj/ap08fj/a08-photoindex.html
Why though? Why should someone be subjected to all of this extra cruft when you can just find the images from websites? As long as Google image search exists, people will find whatever images they want to use. If you're thinking an OS vendor would do proper licensing, that's a nice thought, but the vast majority of people using custom wallpapers don't care about it.
You could even argue that, if you see your wallpaper close to “all the time”, your monitors are larger than you need most of the time.
I remember seeing it on the Leopard keynote. It was glorious with the translucent menubar that ditched the rounded corners.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=766810966790684 (This seems to be the only place to find it online).
https://bzamayo.com/watch-all-the-apple-tv-aerial-video-scre...
Was this filmed with a drone or helicopter? Is it possible the right "permits" weren't obtained before flying over the rush hour traffic?
I have a couple of friends that used to work for Apple, and neither one has any idea why.
For functional reasons, every other desktop UI surface has converged with only a few minor variations. But the static desktop OS background - perhaps because it has no inherent functional purpose and remains covered most of the time - remains as a canvas.
Eons ago, there was a (paid) 3rd-party program for MacOS Classic that would give you a slideshow desktop background. The images were of the Golden Gate bridge, and were a timelapse over the course of a day. The changes were (afair) synced to your local solar time, so 'sunset' in the desktop background would line up with your local sunset.
I'd have to search to find the name of the program, but I kind of wish I had it back.
Also, I hate to do this but if I'm allowed, tinniest plug, I do maintain a screensaver project for macOS that does video both screensaver and wallpaper integration with solar time adaptation : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io (the default download will give you the app that does the wallpaper integration).
One example is the very popular WallpaperEngine [0]. Another cool one (and open source) is Lively Wallpaper [1].
Selfless plug: I've also developed and released LumoTray [2] which is a wallpaper/screensaver manager for windows with some other extra features but without any animated wallpapers except slideshows as I still find it a bit of a resource waste for something that I rarely see.
[0] https://www.wallpaperengine.io
I’ve searched for it several times, but as far as the web is concerned it never existed. Would really like to find it because its default desktop picture was pleasant (during the day, a blue sky over a field of flowers if I recall correctly) and it would be nice to see it again.
Sadly a lot of early-mid-00s Mac shareware like that has seemingly vanished.
i used the catalina bg until late last year, when they started shipping the former appletv video backgrounds as the default, because it was just so good. seriously, after that on a 5k display, i thought i would never enjoy another desktop background
made me chuckle :-)
But for real, there is something about a good wallpaper, at least for me, the wallpaper being the first thing I set on a new linux install.
I fully believe that a solid default wallpaper can help with desktop manager adoption (i.e. kde, gnome, xfce4), at least for the bohemians types like me!
For me, that would be the last time I ever see it. I have so many windows open providing me quick access to whatever I need without flipping spaces or whatever, that I just never see the desktop.
It's just one of those things that over time of using computers, I just don't care about it any more. I don't begrudge anyone that does, but it is just one of those funny things one realizes how time changes one's outlook
That's something I also always do. Even though I use i3 with 100% opaque windows (transparency is ugly and distracting IMO). I could only see wallpaper after startup and maybe 2-3 times during the day if I'm switching from my usual workflow. But for some reason I always set the background. Perhaps an old habit from Windows XP days (Autumn is the best XP wallpaper, fight me).
With the photography it’s one of the things Apple get so right about UX.
When they first introduced those aerial videos for Apple tv, someone made a screensaver out of them for MacOS and I was using that. It turns out whenever I went to smoke, my screensaver would activate and choke the network with 4k (5k?) glory.
https://osxdaily.com/2018/01/01/classic-mac-os-tiling-wallpa...
I noticed this a few days ago when moving a space from one monitor to the other and seeing its desktop picture change. Moving the space back to the original monitor restored the desktop picture.
Not sure why it’s this way, kind of an odd choice.
https://512pixels.net/projects/mac-os-9-5k-wallpapers
My favorites among these are the gradient-rich desktops that dropped in Mac OS 8.5 back in '98, like those UFO ones.
That's when the OS gained support for icons with 24-bit color and 8-bit masks, which are the direct ancestors to today's 1024x1024 32-bit app icons. Perhaps to commemorate this full leveling up of the classic Mac desktop to millions of colors, Apple hired a small team of designers to custom make the UFO, Capsule and Tub desktop pictures.
Screen sized gradients between two relatively close colors almost always land in the sandbar of banding or dithering in order to quantize all those subtle variations to the limited color depth. But these desktops do a beautiful job at avoiding that. I'm not sure, but I think they achieved it by color grading a zero-to-255 3D render with a high bits/channel ratio in Photoshop, tuning the grade and quantizing to 8 bits per pixel from time to time as a sort of gamut warning. Any problematic areas could then be "buffed out" with careful blend mode shenanigans on the boundaries.
I mean one of them is bright green and red? The holy grail of what not to set as a background, as well as one of the most awful color combinations (unless it’s Christmas)
I still like the UFO ones a whole lot though ^_^
I don't think it's reasonable to call this an "archive", as the link does, when the images have undisclosed changes to them and are clearly not the original files :/
0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/10-8-new-wallpaper-back...
10.8 is less obvious so hard to say with 100% certainty, but if you look at, say 10.6 it's super obvious.
Here's the original wallpaper shipped by Apple: https://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/defaultd... Here's the one from this site: https://512pixels.net/downloads/macos-wallpapers-6k/10-6-6k....
If you look at the bright star at the top left, in the original it has a clean lens flare. In the version from this site, the diagonal flare has a zebra stripe pattern. This is characteristic of AI upscaling of a very thin diagonal line.
I remember being in awe as I set up that computer and that was the first computer I started writing some HTML on. All these years and 2 Macbooks later my career is in web dev and I _still_ love MacOS.
"Used to" because it looks it's not updated anymore since around 2 months :(
Was thinking of re-creating the same "open-source" version of it, that would pick and show art from museums around the world every day [2].
Would some of you be interested?
And if by chance you're reading me Jimmy - I love the app and would be happy to help maintain / curate it!
[1] https://www.artdiario.com/
[2] a ton of museums provide free access to their art, such as the National Gallery of Art - https://www.nga.gov/open-access-images.html
Edit: This was really nice to see/hear. Thank you for appreciating this publicly!
And yes I LOVE it! I've installed on at least ~4 different machines of friends as well!
The executable is inside the screen saver application package.
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS
./ScreenSaverEngine -background
I don't like Steve Jobs very much as a person, and I don't quite buy the myth that he was as much of a unique genius as some people believe, but...is it a coincidence that 10.7 marked the end of the (second) Jobs-era at Apple?
...or maybe it's just nostalgia.
10.2/10.3/10.4 are the ones that do it for me. Spent way too much time on my Macs through those years, through which I frequently used the default desktop pictures because they were so smooth and nice to look at, and each OS X release was nicer to use than the last which made for positive associations with each.
10.5/10.6 were good too, but I found the default desktops on those too busy and usually used something else. I also typically used custom themes by way of Shapeshifter[0] because I found the gray metal look of those releases too dark and modded my dock with themes found on MacThemes. As a result the default 10.5/10.6 desktops aren’t emotionally evocative for me.
I do however miss the 10.5/10.6 implementation of virtual desktops, which gave you a 2D grid to place desktops on instead of just a line.
I have a small site that allows some user uploaded content, and I get random notices that threaten legal action unless I buy license (for users that have uploaded content from wherever). My response is just to take them down.
https://petapixel.com/2019/09/16/this-photographer-trio-recr...
They also created one for Monterey since it didn’t ship with exclusive landscape photography:
https://www.techradar.com/news/photographers-make-their-own-...
An elegant design language, for a more civilized age.
https://bzamayo.com/watch-all-the-apple-tv-aerial-video-scre...
Apple has excellent photos and other wallpapers, I would be (slightly) curious what percentage of people just stick with the default?
Off topic, but I like to use my own pictures of places around the world where my wife and I have travelled for desktops. I also like to use high resolution pictures I have taken of favorite art work I have purchased.
Seems like I'm not the only one: https://www.reddit.com/r/MonkeyIsland/comments/dgwm03/the_ne...
I made this thing that breaks down each image by fraction of each color used
https://www.julyp.com/shared/018dae67-9ec0-7191-bd9f-7fe9c85...
Looking at it like a source of color palettes, I really like Venture more...
https://512pixels.net/downloads/macos-wallpapers-thumbs/10-2...
Takes me back to my dorm room on my 13-inch iBook.
This and bliss put me in a wicked nostalgic mood.
I got into computing just as OS X launched. I installed every version with great anticipation. A ritual with my Mac geek friends every year.
I feel we have lost that excitement in todays world.
A change from space to earth after 2012.
And back to abstract in 2021.
More boring and uninteresting Apple boringness
What is so interesting about wallpapers? Nothing!
The typical self promotion through HN.
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Fraidy not old boy
A fly in the ointment
The last three releases as somehow vaginal canals.
This is remarkable because Apple is supposed to be about individuality. Changing the wallpaper could be two clicks away yet most Apple users stay with the stock wallpaper. I think they are focused on work rather than tinkering, with everyone happy with the stock wallpaper.
Meanwhile, on Ubuntu, the first thing I change is the wallpaper. It goes. But then I have full screen apps and never see the wallpaper ever again.
Personally I want the desktop wallpaper to be a black and white terminal window with it showing console messages from syslog, representing the guts of the machine.
