Your desktop wallpaper can inspire or motivate you, help organize your icons and folders (or even serve as your to-do list), or simply serve as amazing eye candy. Here are several fantastic tools for keeping your wallpaper from getting stale.
Automatically Download and Update Your Desktop Wallpaper
The easiest way to keep your desktop looking good with a fresh crop of wallpapers is by having them automatically come to you.
For Windows:
- John's Background Switcher not only is our favorite wallpaper manager, the free program can grab photos from Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Vlastudio, RSS (e.g., DeviantArt), Picasa, Google Image Search, and more.
- If you've got a multi-monitor setup, DisplayFusion offers more monitor customizations and can also load photos similarly from popular online sources. There's both free and Pro versions (you'll need the $25 Pro license for random image rotating).
- If you're a fan of Microsoft's Bing homepage images, the Bing Desktop program will sync your desktop background with the daily Bing.com wallpaper. It also adds a Bing search bar and news headlines to your desktop.
There are many others, including Wallpaper Juggler, which downloads images from interfaceLIFT and WallpaperStock, but the ones above are the most feature-rich.
For Mac, we've recently highlighted Kuvva Wallpapers, which offers a curated selection of images from artists and photographers.
For Windows, Mac, and Linux, there's Wally, which refreshes your wallpaper at your designated intervals with images from sources like Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket.
Seek and Ye Shall Find: Great Wallpaper Sources
There's no shortage of awesome wallpaper sources. We've highlighted several of our favorites a couple of times : VladStudio, 4Chan /Wallpaper Forum, Social Wallpapering, InterfaceLIFT, DeviantART, Wallbase, SimpleDesktops, and the last hive five winner, Digital Blasphemy. (See our most recent hive five for best wallpaper sites and the earlier version for descriptions of these sites.)
Plug those URLs/source feeds into your wallpaper switcher for a surprise every time your wallpaper changes.
Of course, I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention our own curated Wallpaper Wednesdays. (Add it to your RSS feed.)
There are two other great ways to easily find beautiful wallpapers and automatically send them to your desktop wallpaper folder: Desktoppr and IFTT:
- Desktoppr is an awesome wallpaper search engine that syncs with Dropbox (that's a screengrab of it in the top image above). You can search by resolution, date, and popularity, and the Dropbox syncing means you only need to set it up once for all your computers to have those wallpapers.
- If you're browsing Flickr and find a photo you'd like as a wallpaper, this IFTTT recipe makes it easy to do that. Any time you favorite a Flickr photo, it will send it to where you want to put it in Dropbox. Make that Dropbox folder your wallpaper folder, and that's it. You can create (or find) similar recipes for Facebook and Picasa on IFTTT.
Using the solutions above, you should never have to worry about running out of wallpapers or being bored by your desktop. Enjoy!
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