2 Sites To Find The Best “Socially-Selected” Desktop Wallpaper

• June 1, 2012
  
• By Craig Snyde

It’s pretty difficult to find a quality wallpaper site anymore. There’s a ton of them, but many are packed full of plain, boring, “stock” wallpapers that you don’t want sitting on your desktop. There are many more that are polluted even more nefariously, with adware, risky pop-ups and pop-unders, and more. That’s not the kind of stuff I’m into.
I like my web content curated. When I want to read the news, I don’t go to WSJ and NYT. I go immediately to Reddit, where the contributions of relevant news is incentivized. That way, I can count on the next guy to force feed me all of the news I want. Isn’t it beautiful? Since that formula works, why not use it for everything? While the aforementioned Reddit does have some a few really awesome wallpaper-related subreddits, that’s the obvious way to go. I’ve got more for you.

4walled

4walled, as the name casually suggests, is an aggregator that indexes all of the beautiful wallpapers posted on 4chan, the largest imageboard in the US. Yes, 4chan. You know, the evil and hateful site that once bred today’s Anonymous? It’s not so bad, overall. The imageboard’s main attention-grabber, /b/, comes attached with a filthy reputation, but they’ve got plenty of other beautiful boards where intelligent conversation is fairly common. /mu/ for music, /fa/ for fashion, and /wg/ for general wallpapers.

As you can see, 4walled is really a wallpaper search engine. Everything you’d expect is there. For board, just keep it as the default selection if you aren’t familiar or interested in 4chan. Now if you don’t know what SFW is, it’s “safe for work.” Basically, the default here is going to include nudity. You’ll probably see a lot of it if you select the default. If you’re not into any of that, select “Safe For Work”.

Here, I ran a search for the keyword “sunset”. As you can see, there’s nothing extra, no fillers, just awesome wallpapers. You can click them to see some statistics about the individual wallpaper and submitter, and from there save the wallpaper to your hard drive.

Social Wallpapering

Social Wallpapering has adopted that same model as Reddit, where users are able to upvote and downvote wallpapers so that only the highest-quality pieces are visible to new users.

Sign up and you’re able to vote for your favorites and upload your own wallpapers to be ranked by others. As far as browsing goes, you can sort wallpapers by their rank, by their category, screen size, or even just randomly.

Just like 4walled, you can see that it takes a really no-nonsense approach. Your wallpapers are all there in a thumbnail for you to easily preview and browse. Click one and you’ll see statistics and resolutions for all available. Contributing to the quality of the site overall is just as easy, as you can favorite or vote for wallpaper by just hovering over the thumbnail.
There’s no reason to make it harder than it should be. Social internet means we can all be freeloaders. Personally, I love when people do the work for me. It’s always nice to contribute, though! What do you think of these two websites?