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What are your go-to websites and apps for desktop and mobile wallpapers?
My personal favourites are wallhaven for desktop wallpapers and Walli for mobile ones.
I also like Wallpaper Flare for desktop and sometimes Unsplash for both desktop and mobile.
Yours are now also my go-tos, and I've had fun playing around with generative art on GIMP, thanks to you :) Thanks!
I do this, too. I have all kinds of patterns and stuff that I generate for my desktops, in addition to the occasional photograph I've taken.
My own pictures. I prefer seeing pictures of my kids than anything else.
Unsplash. It's not dedicated to wallpapers but I always find nice ones in the app.
When I used wallpapers, I just got them from a Google Images search for the appropriate resolution.
Simple Desktops I had gery_velo as my wallpaper for years.
I like plain, flat wallpapers that aren't particularly distracting. Currently, I've got wallpapers set for each operating system essentially that I've made. One for Windows (a colorized version of the Windows start icon), one for Arch (the ArchLinux written logo, in a nord/Arc colorscheme with blue background and gray diagonal bars), with variations to continue the pattern inverted across four workspaces and two monitors. I've basically distilled it to a formula that only needs color swaps and a new logo SVG sized and centered in Inkscape, then exported to a resolution.
On desktop, I honestly just use the default. I don't want destractions when I'm on a computer generally.
Mobile is completely different. For mobile I have a photo I took that's a close up of some plants showing the earth covered with foliage and the background taken up by trees. It's there specifically to distract me from time to time, and more specifically to remind myself to slow down and enjoy life.
https://animationbgs.blogspot.com/
Scott Wills (the art director for Samurai Jack among other things) uploads backgrounds from projects he has worked on here.
For a long time, I just had
xsetroot -graywithout a compositor, which generates a grid of 1-pixel alternating black and white (see my website for an idea). A compositor flattens that gray out, though, which is really too bad. At one point I had an actual 2x2 bitmap of black and white, but I'm kind of rudderless irt backgrounds at this point.Whew, that really does a number on my eyeballs...or my visual cortex, not sure which.
Oh funky! It really like, calms me down. Like visual white noise.
Could be a different in resolution, or my eyes might just be shitty. It's probably the latter.
Hey, now ... my eyes might be shitty XD
I've used wallhaven for the past few years. I like that I can specify resolutions and has a wide variety of wallpapers
I've been using Wallcat for a year (years?): https://beta.wall.cat/. Changes daily, zero effort.
Wallpaper Abyss
I use an Android app called Tapet that creates a new background for me at set intervals. The backgrounds are abstract, procedurally-generated ones based around different themes. There are lots of different patterns, and you can deactivate ones you don't like and increase the frequency of ones you do. I don't like having pictures as my background since apps obscure parts of the photo, but I don't have the same problem with the abstract art this app generates.
To address this issue, I select, crop and position images with this in mind, and then move app icons around relative to the image. I guess it helps that I'm not the sort of person to have a full grid of apps on a home screen; I spread the apps across multiple home screens, and also make use of icon groups/containers.
Years ago, my go-to was DigitalBlasphemy; I even got a paid subscription for a year (and I am quite stingy), because I loved both his work and his business model.
It's not photos, but rather, beautifully rendered digital artwork.
The site may have changed since then (8-10 yrs ago), but it should still be worth a visit, at least.