Usage and Rights

The images offered here are protected until the Creative Commons License. Please see "Licenses" in the left pane for restrictions and more information.

Availability

It is our desire to have wallpaper versions available for all our images. Some images, however, simply don't fit the desktop aspect ratio without either adding black bars to the sides of the images or cutting off portions of the top and bottom of the image. Neither of these is desirable for our purposes, so those images will not have wallpaper versions. These images are identifiable by their "portrait" or tall appearance.

Other images lacking a wallpaper version simply have not been created by our staff yet. If you see an image that you would for your desktop, simply contact us and let us know the catalog number of the image. We will create the image and notify you when it is up for downloading. This, like all our wallpaper, is free too!

Size

The three most common desktop sizes used by the large majority of internet users today are 640 pixels by 480 pixels, 800 pixels by 600 pixels, and 1024 pixels by 768 pixels. All of these are a consistent aspect ratio (the ration of height to width) so resizing pictures to each of these resolutions can be done cleanly. All desktop wallpapers on this web site are 1152 pixels by 864 pixels. While this resolution isn't a common one, images can be resized to look great on most users' monitors.

Installation

Both Macintosh and Windows offer the ability to choose custom pictures for your desktop. Each also offers the ability to display the image in a couple of different ways (stretch, center, tile, etc.) For these images to properly scale to your desktop, you should choose the "stretch" option if you are running resolutions of 1152x864 or smaller. For resolutions larger than 1152x864 you will need to experiment with these settings to decide which looks most pleasing to you.