Everyone loves a good wallpaper to beautify their desktop or homescreen. We try to post some of the nicer ones we find and to continue that tradition we’re sharing 9 more absolutely gorgeous wallpapers that have been sized for the new iPads retina display. Even if you don’t have a new iPad, the resolution of each image is a whopping 2048 by 2048 pixels which should be high enough to function as desktop backgrounds for most Mac and PC displays too.

Click the images below to open them in a new window, note the pictures hosted on InterfaceLift require manually selecting the screen resolution which will make it easy to get the perfect resolution for your display.

Read more »

Looking for some nice mellow wallpapers to add to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad? The DizzyUp collection features three beautifully subtle wallpapers in a wide variety of common screen resolutions and has also been updated to support the 3rd gen iPad retina 2048×2048 display. The wood paneling is my personal favorite of the group, but if you’re into minimalist wallpapers you won’t want to miss the other two dark & light wallpapers either, which feature unobtrusive gradients over a some gentle patterns.

• Grab each wallpaper from DizzyUp.co.uk

(BTW the light desktop background image looks great with a retro-fied Classic style Mac OS X desktop)

Heads up to 512pixels for the reminder these exist, and for pointing out the iPad retina update.

Read more »

Have you ever set a desktop wallpaper from Safari, only to wish you had saved the file directly so you could access it later or do something else with it? As long as the desktop picture is still set, you can retrieve the original wallpaper image file easily:

• From the Mac OS X Finder, hit Command+Shift+G and type ~/Library/Safari/ as the path
• In the Safari folder, look for “Safari Desktop Picture.*” the suffix could be .png, .jpg, or whatever other image type the original picture was
• Copy the “Safari Desktop Picture.jpg” file to the desktop

The copied file is the wallpaper, you could also move the file instead but moving it will cause the desktop picture to change on next reboot because the source file is no longer in place.

Any background image set through Safari will always show up in that directory.

Looking for some gorgeous high resolution images for your new iPad? Here are a handful of gorgeous retina wallpapers, each measuring 2048×2048 pixels.

Click on any of the images below for a full sized version, though some of the links go to InterfaceLift and the iPad 2048×2048 version must be selected manually from their drop-down download menu, labeled as “new iPad (3rd gen)”. Enjoy!

Read more »

Apple has a knack for picking gorgeous desktop wallpapers, and the all new OS X Mountain Lion is no exception. As you’ve undoubtedly seen in the developer preview information and screen shots, the new default wallpaper is another beautiful space themed image of a swirling blue galaxy (maybe a white dwarf, actually), a bit more subtle than the Andromeda galaxy wallpaper found in OS X Lion. It’s offered as a whopping 3200×2000 pixel image and you can download it below:

• Download the full sized wallpaper here

Even if you can’t can’t run the Dev Preview, you can at least grab the new wallpaper and Messages beta and pretend to run the latest OS X. Developers can download the Developer Preview now, and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be released this summer.

Thanks Daryl

Recently we posted a Mac museum collection that featured an iMac using wallpaper that made it appear like you could see right through to the logic board. It turns out these images are from iFixIt, the company that likes to tear down Apple hardware.

In the process of documenting their teardowns, iFixIt also has taken high resolution images that work great for wallpapers, giving the illusion that there is no screen on the device, and instead making it look as if icons and windows are floating directly atop circuitry. It’s a cool effect, and they have a variety of freely available native resolution wallpapers in this style for the iMac, iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and even the Apple external Thunderbolt display.

• Find them all on iFixit.com’s blog or check out some more images below

If you don’t care about showing the exact hardware for your device, they all make great wallpapers in general. My favorites have to be the iPad and iMac, although the Thunderbolt chip is nice too:

Read more »

The entries into the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest make for some spectacular wallpapers, one of which was shown in a recent tip screenshot and requested. You can find them split between TheAtlantic and National Geographic:

NationalGeographic: National Geographic Contest Entries Wallpapers

TheAtlantic: National Geographic Photo Contest 2011

Most of the wallpapers are best on lower resolution displays of Macs and iOS because they almost all max out somewhere between 1247×831 and 1600×1200 resolution, with the higher res offerings coming from National Geographics wallpaper section. iOS, OS X, and Windows all do a decent job of scaling them up as long as you don’t push them too far. If you’re running a very high resolution, you may want to look elsewhere though.

Looking for a few more gorgeous wallpapers for your desktop? This pack of colorful aurora themed images should do the trick, with two variations of each image, one with a Windows 7ish aurora stripey look and the other a blurred faint aurora more reminiscent of OS X. They all look great, and with the 2560×1600 resolution they should fit just about any screen size you’re working with.

Download the wallpaper pack from DeviantArt

The wallpaper pack is hosted on DeviantArt, if you’re having trouble finding their download link it’s highlighted clearly below in an image, just look on the right side of the DA page.

These background pics come from the same artist who produced the great looking star field and other aurora 6 pack, they’ve been keeping my Mac beautiful for months now.
Read more »

Here’s another nice background picture, by request, it’s the blue sky star field wallpaper that was shown in a recent screenshot of Mission Control. This one isn’t part of a pack, but it does include the base PSD file so you can make your own variations of the blue night sky if you are up for it.

You can download it here from DeviantArt

This wallpaper comes at 2560×1600 and was created by the same artist who put together the nice six pack of aurora backgrounds.

If you have trouble locating the download link on DeviantArt, it’s highlighted in an image below.
Read more »

Mac OS X Lion changed the way desktop background pictures are handled. In short, if the image is fit to or larger than your Macs screen resolution, it won’t tile. Likewise, the default OS X Lion wallpapers don’t have the option to tile or change how they are orientated on your display.

The easiest solution to this is simple: you have to use a background image that will tile, meaning it is smaller than your screens resolution.

For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’ll use the linen wallpaper tile from OS X Lion and iOS 5:

• Have the wallpaper tile somewhere easy to find, like the OS X Lion desktop
• Open “System Preferences” from the  Apple menu
• Click on “Desktop & Screen Saver”
• Drag the wallpaper image you want to tile into the picture window
• When the pull-down menu becomes visible, select “Tile” from the list

If you don’t select “Tile” manually, the default will usually be “Stretch” which looks terrible for most images that are meant to be tiled.

Why was this behavior changed in Mac OS X Lion? Who knows, but we’ve received several questions about this and a few emails which indicates there’s a fair amount of confusion on how this background pictures are handled in 10.7.