Free windows wallpaper download

If you’re on your computer or phone for hours a day (and let’s be real—you are), you can keep things interesting with desktop wallpaper. If you want to go beyond what’s included in your operating system or old photos from your camera roll, you can find thousands and thousands of alternatives on the internet.

So whether you love switching out beautiful desktop wallpaper or just want something minimal that you’re going to open windows over anyway, here are some of our picks for wallpaper.

WallpaperStock

WallpaperStock makes our list because of its huge selection of free wallpapers across many categories. You can download wallpaper for specific mobile devices, screen resolutions, and social media platforms. While you can sort for the top wallpapers or use the random function, there’s no easy way to view by category other than searching for something specific and clicking through category tags.

Plus, the site shows ads, which is a little distracting. But overall, the selection is worth a look.

Social Wallpapering

Social Wallpapering started ages ago with a Digg-like approach to create a user-curated collection of wallpapers, organized by quality based on user votes. The Social Wallpapering community may not be big enough to really get the wallpapers organized that way, but the collection of available images is huge and updated with new submissions fairly regularly.

The sort-by-category function is a little wonky, but you can also upload your own images or create an account to save your favorites.

DeviantArt Wallpaper

DeviantArt is a huge community of artists and fans, and among the many things you can find on the site is a huge collection of wallpapers. It features everything from photos and illustrations to abstract digital art—even fantasy or fanart of your favorite movie, video game, or comic franchise. You can select a category, sort by newest or most popular, or search for something specific in the site’s massive database.

You can’t filter specifically for resolution or display size, and the categories aren’t cut and dried, so it can be tricky to find exactly what you’re looking for. That said, it’s consistently been one of our favorite desktop web sites.

Desktop Nexus

One of our favorite underrated desktop wallpaper sites, Desktop Nexus has a community of over a million users who have collectively uploaded and voted on nearly million wallpapers. Everything at Desktop Nexus is neatly organized by category, and if you select one category, a wealth of subcategories opens up underneath it (and you can view them all here).

All of the wallpapers are organized by member votes, so you can sort by what’s popular or new or search for something specific. FYI: you have to be a member for at least a month or upload 25 of your own wallpapers in order to vote on others.

rushbrookrathbone.co.uk

rushbrookrathbone.co.uk is updated daily with high-def photos, illustrations, and more. You can sort by featured, popular, or latest, browse based on category, or search for something specific. When you go to download, you can choose your specific mobile device, your computer screen resolution, or even a social media platform (like a Facebook cover photo).

You don’t have to create an account to download wallpapers, but you can in order to upload or save your favorites.

Wallhaven

Wallhaven started out as a project to replace/rebuild/improve upon Wallbase, which is dead now but used to be one of our favorite wallpaper sites just because it scraped wallpapers from so many sources we also liked.

The community is massive, the database is large, and once you have a free account, you can browse by tag or popularity (the Toplist option), filter for SFW images (or not), choose specific resolutions, or roll the dice with the Random function and see what you come up with. Best of all, the site has infinite scroll, so you don’t have to click through multiple pages to view more wallpapers.

InterfaceLift

Another old (and well-loved) standard in the wallpaper community, IntefaceLift has long been a premier source of beautiful wallpapers of natural scenes, photos-turned-wallpapers, and more. Plus, the site deals in more than just wallpapers: like DeviantArt, there’s a huge community of people there making icon packs, system themes, and more.

InterfaceLift will automatically detect your screen resolution and show you wallpapers accordingly—you can also sort by resolution or device. The site may not have the massive selection or scraped images from others on this list, and it isn’t updated as regularly, but you can see everything about the photos you download, including the cameras used to take them, who took them, and their comments.