I wish more OSes would work with independent photographers to compile a set of beautiful wallpapers. It used to feel easy to find good wallpaper online, but nowadays, especially with macOS's hiDPI settings and my personal desire for #000 true black wallpapers to hide notches and camera holes, it can feel very difficult. Search engines don't yield good results for 4k or 5k images, and a lot of the hi-res wallpaper subreddits have disappeared since their API debacle.
I source solid wallpapers from a couple of OSes for use in macOS:
Try searching at somewhere like wallhaven.cc[1], which aggregates wallpapers with good tagging, colour, size and ratio-based searches.
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.
A lot of amateur wallpapers have this weird cliché aesthetic. It’s the same two-thirds framing, and (at least to me) some intangible form of unresolved tension or a general feeling of the photographer trying too hard (vs an impromptu shot).
Another vote for wallhaven, have found several high quality 5k and 6k+ desktop pictures there, as well as some for odd aspect ratios (e.g. 5k portrait). Its predecessor Wallbase was also great.
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.
It's infuriating finding an excellent wallpaper, only to find that it's 900 pixels wide or "4k" with so much compression it looks worse than uncompressed 720p. That and the grotesque photoshops that fill the results when looking for space wallpapers.
On the plus side, Tineye can be quite helpful for finding things in their original size.
> That and the grotesque photoshops that fill the results when looking for space wallpapers
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.
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 :)
FWIW my windows 11 laptop I use has a new high quality wallpaper every day. I don't know where it gets the images from, but many are pretty cool even if they are a bit "too HDRy" at times.
If you need to hide the dumb notch, I’d take my nice wallpaper, scale it down to the exact resolution, and just add a black bar as high as the menu bar is. This can be a bit ugly when the wallpaper appears without the menu bar, but it’s a fine solution nonetheless. (I had to do this in Big Sur, since the OS thought my wallpaper works best with a black text on the menu bar, which wasn’t actually too readable.)
One thing I found annoying about the MBP mini LED screen is that macOS will not make the menu bar truly black, no matter how hard I've tried.
Even using a #000000 picture as background, with 'Digital Color Meter' claiming that the screen is showing 000 everywhere, in dark environments it's obvious that the menu bar is a different color from the rest of the background.
> I wish more OSes would work with independent photographers to compile a set of beautiful wallpapers.
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.
It's nice to use software, or anything really, where effort has been made to make it beautiful as well as functional. Also it's good to support and highlight good photography.
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.
[1] https://wallhaven.cc/