There are a ton of wallpapers here that I never believed people were actually using as such. Yet I am constantly surprised to learn people actually do put those on their desktop, including a lot of NSFW wallpapers (I guess it helps being single).
Some people if they like a picture and it's large enough they'll put it on their desktop. This also includes everybody who uses holiday snapshots or pictures of their kids as their wallpapers. Nothing wrong with that! It makes life a lot easier. Unless you just so happen to be a professional photographer or designer your own pictures probably won't match what you can find on the internet, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't love your own creations.
Others may be a lot pickier, me included. Those I ask: What qualities do you expect a wallpaper to have before you consider it a candidate for your desktop?
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Personally, I prefer wallpapers that don't have too many small details. I don't have any Icons on my desktop but in my mind it is still a background and should behave like one. If you can't grasp the entire picture at a single glance, that's not a background. Though that doesn't mean it shouldn't be interesting. Here are a few examples:
Since I'm a fan of macro photography I like wallpapers with lots of depth of field (“blurry background”) like the following:
I also like minimalistic wallpapers with a little something in the center, preferably white on a blue-ish gradient:
As a counter example, the following pictures are awesome but I'd never use them as a desktop background because there's just way too much going on for my taste:
You may notice I'm not terribly picky about motivs. I like stuff that is nerdy or has some nature in it but it's not that important, as long as it's something I can agree with. I care more about what the whole picture looks like, about technique, composition and all those fancy words.
So what about you?