My favorites among these are the gradient-rich desktops that dropped in Mac OS 8.5 back in '98, like those UFO ones.
That's when the OS gained support for icons with 24-bit color and 8-bit masks, which are the direct ancestors to today's 1024x1024 32-bit app icons. Perhaps to commemorate this full leveling up of the classic Mac desktop to millions of colors, Apple hired a small team of designers to custom make the UFO, Capsule and Tub desktop pictures.
Screen sized gradients between two relatively close colors almost always land in the sandbar of banding or dithering in order to quantize all those subtle variations to the limited color depth. But these desktops do a beautiful job at avoiding that. I'm not sure, but I think they achieved it by color grading a zero-to-255 3D render with a high bits/channel ratio in Photoshop, tuning the grade and quantizing to 8 bits per pixel from time to time as a sort of gamut warning. Any problematic areas could then be "buffed out" with careful blend mode shenanigans on the boundaries.
Wow, I always thought there was something strange about those gradients, and you’re right! The distinct lack of banding despite the limited variation in hue!
Speaking as an outsider that has no emotional attachment to those wallpapers: wow, they’re really awful (except maybe the first one)
I mean one of them is bright green and red? The holy grail of what not to set as a background, as well as one of the most awful color combinations (unless it’s Christmas)
Many are undeniably garish by today's standards, on today's devices, and although they were maybe more refreshing to our palettes at the time and less intense in the default monitor color spaces back then, I must confess, I distinctly remember vetoing several of these desktop pictures as a late 90s Mac user, including the ones you pointed out. And the era of subtler, muted colors and tones showed up pretty quickly after these for valid reasons.
I agree. Black and white often pop up against certain types of content (e.g. white spreadsheets on black background, dark mode terminals on white), but gray's a good compromise.
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.
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 subreddits have disappeared since their API debacle.
I source solid wallpapers from a couple of OSes for use in macOS:
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 search away usually to find the original.
A lot of amateur wallpapers have this weird cliché aesthetic. It’s the same two-thirds framing, and (at least to me) some intangible form of unresolved tension or a general feeling of the photographer trying too hard (vs an impromptu shot).
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.
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.
> That and the grotesque photoshops that fill the results when looking for space wallpapers
Use the HST and JWST pages for space wallpaper sources[1][2]. Make sure to check only the 'observation' checkbox; this filters out all the infographics, 'artist's impressions', simulations, etc.
I suggest downloading the TIFF, opening this in some photo post-processing program (Lightroom, Darktable, RawTherapee, etc), and applying mild tone and colour adjustments, and then cropping to the exact resolution of your display.
My favorite source for all space-related pictures are the Apollo flight journal photography archives[1].
I’m not sure if there’s a better resource, as-is you have to click through to see a higher resolution version to check if the picture is even in focus, but honestly that adds to the fun of it :)
FWIW my windows 11 laptop I use has a new high quality wallpaper every day. I don't know where it gets the images from, but many are pretty cool even if they are a bit "too HDRy" at times.
If you need to hide the dumb notch, I’d take my nice wallpaper, scale it down to the exact resolution, and just add a black bar as high as the menu bar is. This can be a bit ugly when the wallpaper appears without the menu bar, but it’s a fine solution nonetheless. (I had to do this in Big Sur, since the OS thought my wallpaper works best with a black text on the menu bar, which wasn’t actually too readable.)
One thing I found annoying about the MBP mini LED screen is that macOS will not make the menu bar truly black, no matter how hard I've tried.
Even using a #000000 picture as background, with 'Digital Color Meter' claiming that the screen is showing 000 everywhere, in dark environments it's obvious that the menu bar is a different color from the rest of the background.
> I wish more OSes would work with independent photographers to compile a set of beautiful wallpapers.
Why though? Why should someone be subjected to all of this extra cruft when you can just find the images from websites? As long as Google image search exists, people will find whatever images they want to use. If you're thinking an OS vendor would do proper licensing, that's a nice thought, but the vast majority of people using custom wallpapers don't care about it.
It's nice to use software, or anything really, where effort has been made to make it beautiful as well as functional. Also it's good to support and highlight good photography.
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.
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 program, but I kind of wish I had it back.
To be fair, most built in wallpapers in macOS do have a day/night version (for example Sonoma), or multiple versions with sunrise/day/sunset/night (Ventura, Monterey, Big sur). Apple does call them Dynamic backgrounds and they will switch automatically during the day.
Also, I hate to do this but if I'm allowed, tinniest plug, I do maintain a screensaver project for macOS that does video both screensaver and wallpaper integration with solar time adaptation : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io (the default download will give you the app that does the wallpaper integration).
Well, it's not for MacOS, but software to run animated wallpapers exist for Windows.
One example is the very popular WallpaperEngine [0]. Another cool one (and open source) is Lively Wallpaper [1].
Selfless plug: I've also developed and released LumoTray [2] which is a wallpaper/screensaver manager for windows with some other extra features but without any animated wallpapers except slideshows as I still find it a bit of a resource waste for something that I rarely see.
There was one of these apps for early versions of OS X too.
I’ve searched for it several times, but as far as the web is concerned it never existed. Would really like to find it because its default desktop picture was pleasant (during the day, a blue sky over a field of flowers if I recall correctly) and it would be nice to see it again.
Sadly a lot of early-mid-00s Mac shareware like that has seemingly vanished.
I used to be a wallpaper hoarder but nowadays my wallpaper is just 100% black color to avoid the janky brightness shift while minimizing/maximizing dark themed windows. I have a large monitor so the effect is more pronounced compared to a smaller laptop screen.
(admirable) these images did incredible psychic damage to kde designers
i used the catalina bg until late last year, when they started shipping the former appletv video backgrounds as the default, because it was just so good. seriously, after that on a 5k display, i thought i would never enjoy another desktop background
> (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!
> the wallpaper being the first thing I set on a new linux install
For me, that would be the last time I ever see it. I have so many windows open providing me quick access to whatever I need without flipping spaces or whatever, that I just never see the desktop.
It's just one of those things that over time of using computers, I just don't care about it any more. I don't begrudge anyone that does, but it is just one of those funny things one realizes how time changes one's outlook
> the wallpaper being the first thing I set on a new linux install
That's something I also always do.
Even though I use i3 with 100% opaque windows (transparency is ugly and distracting IMO). I could only see wallpaper after startup and maybe 2-3 times during the day if I'm switching from my usual workflow.
But for some reason I always set the background. Perhaps an old habit from Windows XP days (Autumn is the best XP wallpaper, fight me).
Years ago in one of my previous jobs, we started to have issues with the internet connection multiple times a day. After a couple of days someone noticed that the issues happen whenever I go out for smoking.
When they first introduced those aerial videos for Apple tv, someone made a screensaver out of them for MacOS and I was using that. It turns out whenever I went to smoke, my screensaver would activate and choke the network with 4k (5k?) glory.
I was in a room of Apple TV engineers when the screensaver of I-110 in LA came on. Everyone agreed that it caused mild anxiety. I'm glad I don't see it in the rotation anymore.
It links off to `https://sylvan.apple.com/` which has a name mismatch cert error. If you follow the url in the console (and ignore the cert error) you can download it. Not super convenient but there you are.
Intense nostalgia. I remember my updating my MacBook from Tiger to Leopard and being inthralled with the new OS welcome video. It was a powerful feeling like a genuine leap was made after rebooting and new powers unlocked. 10.3 used Rokysopp's Eple, and I still love that song and album.
Looking back at the 10.4-10.7 era, I really miss those app icons, they were so easy to tell apart from each other just from shape. The rest of the design language was also a marvel in usability, it was so clear what everything was and how to interact with it.
It's not mentioned on the page, but at least 10.0 to 10.8 are AI upscaled -- you can tell from the artifacts when looking at the image closely.
I don't think it's reasonable to call this an "archive", as the link does, when the images have undisclosed changes to them and are clearly not the original files :/
Thank you for saying it, undisclosed "enhancements" like this just remind me of the botched Ecce Homo painting restoration. A request to the world: If you're going to post an "enhanced" version of something, at least share the original too.
Hmm, this forum post[0] is from 2012 and includes a high res photo from the OS, but it seems nearly visually identical to the photo on 512pixels.net. I don't see almost any artifacts that give me the impression of AI upscaling.
That 10.8 wallpaper you linked looks original. 3200 x 2000 appears to be the original resolution for Lion and Mountain Lion (also note how the version on this site is cropped).
10.8 is less obvious so hard to say with 100% certainty, but if you look at, say 10.6 it's super obvious.
If you look at the bright star at the top left, in the original it has a clean lens flare. In the version from this site, the diagonal flare has a zebra stripe pattern. This is characteristic of AI upscaling of a very thin diagonal line.
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.
I think what’s actually happening here is that spaces have separate desktop picture settings between displays.
I noticed this a few days ago when moving a space from one monitor to the other and seeing its desktop picture change. Moving the space back to the original monitor restored the desktop picture.
Not sure why it’s this way, kind of an odd choice.
Happens to me too. I use a display link'd dell dock from work, with 3 monitors. Every few times i plug it in, the wall papers revert, and the wallpapervideoextension process starts soaking up ram and cpu cycles (I dont use video wallpapers at all, just static images from my folder as wallpapers everywhere). I've made it a habit to check the activity manager everyday after I plug in the mac, and kill that process if its taking up too much resources.
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 ?
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.
Even more fun was the fact the wallpaper widget had a little pixel editor built in that let you make your own tiling pattern. I seem to recall that it updated the desktop in realtime as you changed the pixels so you always knew exactly what your pattern looked like tiled.
Oh, memory unblocked! Didn't Windows 98 had something similar? It could be Win95 but I think it would be too much for that time, and for XP we already had background images in "good quality".
I don't think Windows ever included anything like it with the OS. Windows 95 switched to having a giant JPEG background for the wow factor. Certainly there could have been a third party program that implemented that functionality, but I don't think Microsoft ever shipped it with the OS. Maybe as one of those optional fun pack things they used to offer?
I'm obsessed with having a clean desktop, and beautiful wallpapers.
Until recently, I used a neat little app for MacOS called Artdiario [1] that would update my wallpaper every day with a beautiful piece of art and I LOVED it.
"Used to" because it looks it's not updated anymore since around 2 months :(
Was thinking of re-creating the same "open-source" version of it, that would pick and show art from museums around the world every day [2].
Would some of you be interested?
And if by chance you're reading me Jimmy - I love the app and would be happy to help maintain / curate it!
Yo I would love the help to maintain/curate. A combination of the holidays and a really aggressive start to the new year at work made me fall off the update wagon. Email me and we can setup a time to chat.
Edit: This was really nice to see/hear. Thank you for appreciating this publicly!
To me leopard is the most iconic. In my head it’s the wallpaper of modern macOS. I still remember back in the day that was the first thing I downloaded when I tried to make my Vista PC look at least a little bit like a Mac :-)
Agreed, it felt like such a major leap in modernity from the Aqua wallpapers. I still think of it as the definitive 2000s Mac OS X wallpaper, it really was everywhere in no way any of their wallpapers have been since. It was like the Bliss counterpart to Mac OS X
Same, leopard was the version that just came out when I bought my first white Macbook with money I saved as a kid shoveling driveways for an entire winter (and admittedly got paid too much by neighbors to do so).
I remember being in awe as I set up that computer and that was the first computer I started writing some HTML on. All these years and 2 Macbooks later my career is in web dev and I _still_ love MacOS.
There is a link at the top for pre-OSX wallpapers. There was one in MacOS 7 or 8 that was called "platte pinda's" in Dutch meaning "flat(tened) peanuts)". That name mystified me at the time. Googling it now, there's only one result for that phrase, completely unrelated. Am I making this up?
Just got a MacBook Air from the store, latest Sonoma 14.3.1, and the default wallpaper was the photorealistic one (“Sonoma Horizon”), not the abstract one.
Louie Mantia has colored, re-rendered versions of the 10.0 Cheetah Wallpaper that include Dark Mode versions. They are great:
https://lmnt.me/blog/wallpapers/
That is a cool trip down memory lane. Not only macOS, but also when updating Linux distributions it is always fun to see new eye candy on the desktop.
Apple has excellent photos and other wallpapers, I would be (slightly) curious what percentage of people just stick with the default?
Off topic, but I like to use my own pictures of places around the world where my wife and I have travelled for desktops. I also like to use high resolution pictures I have taken of favorite art work I have purchased.
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.
I remember when having a wallpaper was a big deal. I have a few screenshots of my desktops over the years and they do bring back memories. But I've used a tiling window manager for the past 5 years or so and there's no point having a wallpaper. I consider it a waste of screen space now.
Not a critique of MacOS here, but generally stock OS bundled wallpapers for any device are always so generic. Probably a lot of effort goes into picking ones that offends the least amount of people, hence the trend in recent years of just colours and shapes. Only the colour-blind would be offended by those.
Tangentially related, my pal had a photo similar to the Andromeda in macOS 10.7 Lion licensed via 500px->Getty Images and it was used on Colbert last night:
My last mac was a Powerbook g4 12 inch with OS 10.3 Panther, but for some reason I clearly recall the 10.0 wallpaper being the one it came with and the one I stared at for years. The proper 10.3 wallpaper doesn't look familiar at all.
The Catalina wallpaper threw me off guard when I first saw it. It looks exactly like a Bryce landscape I made in the late 90s. I spent some time trying to find it in my data archives but alas it is likely lost.
I'd stumbled across this site just recently after realising that the MacOS Monterey upgrade apparently deletes the Yosemite wallpapers. Which is quite unfortunate.
The 10.4 wallpaper brings back some nostalgia for me. It was the first time I could afford to buy a new laptop and I splurged on the 06 core duo macbook pro.
Everything up through 10.6 makes me feel indescribably warm and fuzzy.
I don't like Steve Jobs very much as a person, and I don't quite buy the myth that he was as much of a unique genius as some people believe, but...is it a coincidence that 10.7 marked the end of the (second) Jobs-era at Apple?
> Everything up through 10.6 makes me feel indescribably warm and fuzzy.
10.2/10.3/10.4 are the ones that do it for me. Spent way too much time on my Macs through those years, through which I frequently used the default desktop pictures because they were so smooth and nice to look at, and each OS X release was nicer to use than the last which made for positive associations with each.
10.5/10.6 were good too, but I found the default desktops on those too busy and usually used something else. I also typically used custom themes by way of Shapeshifter[0] because I found the gray metal look of those releases too dark and modded my dock with themes found on MacThemes. As a result the default 10.5/10.6 desktops aren’t emotionally evocative for me.
I do however miss the 10.5/10.6 implementation of virtual desktops, which gave you a 2D grid to place desktops on instead of just a line.
I'm curious about this. Somebody pulls a bunch of images from Apple and hosts them on their site. Surely this runs afoul of something.
I have a small site that allows some user uploaded content, and I get random notices that threaten legal action unless I buy license (for users that have uploaded content from wherever). My response is just to take them down.
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Even if you never use Apple Veblen Goods and have no idea how to use the funny keyboard, mouse and interface that defines Mac OSX, these desktop wallpapers are very familiar.
This is remarkable because Apple is supposed to be about individuality. Changing the wallpaper could be two clicks away yet most Apple users stay with the stock wallpaper. I think they are focused on work rather than tinkering, with everyone happy with the stock wallpaper.
Meanwhile, on Ubuntu, the first thing I change is the wallpaper. It goes. But then I have full screen apps and never see the wallpaper ever again.
Personally I want the desktop wallpaper to be a black and white terminal window with it showing console messages from syslog, representing the guts of the machine.
https://512pixels.net/projects/mac-os-9-5k-wallpapers
My favorites among these are the gradient-rich desktops that dropped in Mac OS 8.5 back in '98, like those UFO ones.
That's when the OS gained support for icons with 24-bit color and 8-bit masks, which are the direct ancestors to today's 1024x1024 32-bit app icons. Perhaps to commemorate this full leveling up of the classic Mac desktop to millions of colors, Apple hired a small team of designers to custom make the UFO, Capsule and Tub desktop pictures.
Screen sized gradients between two relatively close colors almost always land in the sandbar of banding or dithering in order to quantize all those subtle variations to the limited color depth. But these desktops do a beautiful job at avoiding that. I'm not sure, but I think they achieved it by color grading a zero-to-255 3D render with a high bits/channel ratio in Photoshop, tuning the grade and quantizing to 8 bits per pixel from time to time as a sort of gamut warning. Any problematic areas could then be "buffed out" with careful blend mode shenanigans on the boundaries.