Photo: ©nini.tjader.2014
Yesterday I shot this picture. Made me think of a certain desktop picture for Windows that is widely used. I am on a Mac so it has never been mine, but I’ve seen it. Similar to this. Blue sky, green fields…
I’ve always loved desktop pictures/desktop backgrounds. Have collected them for many years. It is one of the things that make looking at your screen a little bit more interesting than the work you are doing… Or to get a bit of a change of the view with the desktop picture.
I’ve my desktop pictures set at automatically changing every 30 minute randomly. And at restart (which nowadays doesn’t happen all that often). System presently has 1.749 pictures to choose between… Yes I do delete pictures now and then and I could definitely reduce that number a bit… But, they are low-res images so do not take up all that much space on the harddisk (524MB as a matter of fact).
I’ve mainly collected my desktop pictures for the Mac at Macdesktops.com. They don’t add any new ones nowadays, but for many years you could participate and send in your pictures to share with the rest of the world as desktop pictures. The old pictures are still there, but they no longer accept any new ones. I have quite a few there myself. They are regular .jpg images so can be used on any computer, not just Macs.
Might be that Mac-users more frequently used desktop pictures as we normally do not cover the entire screen with the applications used. Macs can do that too nowadays, but most Mac-users who have never been Windows-users do not use that function.
I also had desktop pictures for download at my own old site. Those are still there but I have not added any new ones for a couple of years. I only provided them in one size – 1280×1024, which is a very odd size today. It wasn’t then… Macdesktops.com provides them in several sizes, so you can choose according to your screensize. Even if the picture is not in accordance with your screensize it can still be used as a desktop picture.
So what makes a good desktop picture? Depends on what kind of images you like. Personally I prefer landscapes, no people or animals. I find those restful to look at when thinking about something else.
People who work with images/photos normally do not want desktop pictures – they prefer a neutral grey screen background that will not interfere with the colors in the image they work with. For me personally, having a desktop picture has never disturbed me when working with images. But that’s me.
This is one of my own desktop pictures at Macdesktop.com from 2002.
