Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every default macOS wallpaper

512pixels.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 182 posts

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#101

Post by jwells89 »

bbrks wrote: post #80
vanilla_nut wrote: post #42

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 sub…

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 s…

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.

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#102

Post by jwells89 »

danans wrote: post #49

Tangentially, I find wallpaper to be fascinating as it's one of the few aspects of desktop UX that is basically still 100% open to self-expression. 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.

I leave at least a few pixels around the edges of windows to let my desktop picture show through, partially because that’s some of the little remaining customization but also because having my screens filled to the brim with windows negatively impacts my mood, as silly as that sounds. The desktops I choose usually carry a positive and/or calming vibe and that’s felt during my workday if some of it can show through.

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#103

Post by mostlysimilar »

cwizou wrote: post #91
mostlysimilar wrote: post #14

They're beautiful, but a small tangent... the latest macOS has a bug that repeatedly reverts the wallpaper to the default whenever I unplug/plug my external monitor and it's driving me crazy.

Sonoma did change the way wallpaper (and screensavers) get integrated (preferences have moved in an unusual place/preferences format too) which may be the root cause of this (although I admit I never hit that precise bug). Are you using classic images or some of the built in videos ?

It always defaults back to one of the new animated ones, and I always manually set it back to the solid black color option.

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#104

Post by jsz0 »

I'm not a big fan of any of the modern macOS or iOS wallpapers. They're so busy it's hard to even read text labels on top of them. My goto background for many years was Leopard Server but it was eventually replaced by the Linen tile texture that IIRC wasn't a default wallpaper choice but could be copied out of the system folder.

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#105

Post by cwizou »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #103
cwizou wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonoma did change the way wallpaper (and screensavers) get integrated (preferences have moved in an unusual place/preferences format too) which may be the root cause of this (although I admit I never hit that precise bug). Are you using classic images or some of the built in videos ?

It always defaults back to one of the new animated ones, and I always manually set it back to the solid black color option.

If you are willing to try something, I would suggest an image (of your solid black color) instead.

Because of how the new system work, I wouldn't be surprised the bug is limited to those solid color backgrounds (which are handled quite differently for historic reasons, and it could very well be why you get the error).

The new wallpaper system is a bit of a mess, and solid colors have always been treated weirdly in their preferences.

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#106

Post by edu »

xanderlewis wrote: post #98
bbrks wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I get all of mine from https://unsplash.com .

+1 to unsplash

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#107

Post by marpstar »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #48

These were the best ones IMO: https://wallpapertag.com/img/eyJpdiI6ImlFY2hqYStNSno4Z0dBcGY... https://wallpapertag.com/img/eyJpdiI6IlZ2N1R4bVpXYm9DVTRPS3l...

I worked at Best Buy circa 2005 and we had a single Mac Mini on the floor that had the fish wallpaper and it always drew me in. I had no interest in Macs at the time, but there was something alluring behind that wallpaper.

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#108

Post by squiffsquiff »

nullhole wrote: post #51
danans wrote: post #49

Tangentially, I find wallpaper to be fascinating as it's one of the few aspects of desktop UX that is basically still 100% open to self-expression. 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.

> the static desktop OS background 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 p…

Current versions of MacOS allow you to have a slideshow for your wallpaper

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#109

Post by SSLy »

Affric wrote: post #92
_benj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (admirable) these images did incredible psychic damage to kde designers 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!

Do you have a recommendation for a good place to source wallpapers? With the photography it’s one of the things Apple get so right about UX.

unsplash perhaps?

Re: Every default macOS wallpaper

#110

Post by AlexAndScripts »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #42

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 sub…

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.

And I only use 1080p!

Post reply on HN